Music is an art and art has its own rules.
NINA SIMONEThe worst thing about that kind of prejudice is that while you feel hurt and angry and all the rest of it, it feeds you self-doubt. You start thinking, perhaps I am not good enough.
More Nina Simone Quotes
-
-
I don’t like rap music at all. I don’t think it’s music. It’s just a beat and rapping.
NINA SIMONE -
If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.
NINA SIMONE -
It doesn’t matter to me what is going on today because my music encompasses every kind of mood that exists in human beings. That’s my stick.
NINA SIMONE -
I do love to sing Jacques Brel songs, intensely. I get terribly excited, just by reading a couple of lines in any one of his songs.
NINA SIMONE -
Desegregation is a joke.
NINA SIMONE -
I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.
NINA SIMONE -
My love is like the wind and wild is the wind. Give me more than one caress, satisfy my hungriness. Let the wind blow through your heart for wild is the wind.
NINA SIMONE -
I know I’m different, but I don’t think about it.
NINA SIMONE -
I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I’ve dreamed.
NINA SIMONE -
I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I’m not going.
NINA SIMONE -
My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I’m trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.
NINA SIMONE -
Music has been a burden and a joy for as long as I can remember.
NINA SIMONE -
There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
NINA SIMONE -
Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.
NINA SIMONE -
It is difficult to retain your standards with the pressure of trying to make money, which always has its rules. It’s hard to walk the tightrope of doing what you think is your best and making money at it.
NINA SIMONE -
This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.
NINA SIMONE -
Music is the center of my life.
NINA SIMONE -
Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.
NINA SIMONE -
You can’t be different if you look at it. Being gifted is different. I had that in my piano playing. I’m very thankful for that. I’m very aware of that. The style and what I fed is just me. I never worked at it. It just happened.
NINA SIMONE -
How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
NINA SIMONE -
It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
NINA SIMONE -
Since I was three I’ve been playing the piano. I’ve been onstage.
NINA SIMONE -
Tomorrow, I might be in a different mood and you wouldn’t recognize my voice.
NINA SIMONE -
Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I’m lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.
NINA SIMONE -
Through music you can become sad, joyful, loving, you can learn. You can learn mathematics, touch, pacing Oh my God! Ooh Wow You can see colors through music. Anything!
NINA SIMONE -
We have ordered things so long in a certain way, we are numb. Nobody dares question it. This is what is wrong, symbolically, with America.
NINA SIMONE