How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
NINA SIMONEFunk, gospel, blues is all out of slavery times, out of depression, out of sorrow.
More Nina Simone Quotes
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This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it.
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Life is short. People are not easy to know. They’re not easy to know, so if you don’t tell them how you feel, you’re not going to get anywhere, I feel.
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Theory and harmony broadened my mind in music. I know what music is made of.
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I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.
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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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I try to swim every damn day I can, and I’ve learned to scuba dive and snorkel.
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That’s a very high goal to have, study eight hours a day to be a concert pianist.
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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.
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I believe in racial memory too. I’m sure I’ve got ancient African blood in me that has something to do with what I am.
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I love the classics but there are many new ideas to be made into reality. I’d rather be concerned with my own thing. There are many masters of classical piano so I’ll leave it to them.
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Greed has driven the world crazy. And I think I’m lucky that I have a place over here that I can call home.
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Every day has its emotional difficulties. I miss my mother whether I’m singing her music or not.
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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.
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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.
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Music is an art and art has its own rules.
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It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
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There’s no excuse for the young people not knowing who the heroes and heroines are or were.
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I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.
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I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.
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Music is the center of my life.
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Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.
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From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
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Desegregation is a joke.
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I look forward to doing my own show, not someone else’s. That’s always been my dream.
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I’m sorry that I did not become the world’s first black classic pianist. I think I would have been happier.
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If I want to take a particular form of blues somewhere else I have the equipment to do it but I never even thought of it.
NINA SIMONE