It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
NINA SIMONEJazz 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.
More Nina Simone Quotes
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How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
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It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day and I’m feeling good.
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The allusion was that I was actually naked. I loved that. It always, kind of shocked people enough that they became mine immediately.
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It’s logical that people from bad times will reflect their feelings in their communication. Music is part of the communication. If you lived it, you can do it.
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Slavery has never been abolished from America’s way of thinking.
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I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don’t think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.
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I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I’ve dreamed.
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I demand perfection in what I do, and I practice very hard before I give a concert-sometimes three to six hours a day.
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What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did.
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What is love but a prelude to sorrow with heartache ahead for your goal.
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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 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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You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.
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I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.
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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.
NINA SIMONE






