My singing, if you want to call it that is merely another medium of expression. Just an instrument I play. That’s how I see my voice.
NINA SIMONEIt was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
More Nina Simone Quotes
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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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Many times I feel different like a different person.
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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.
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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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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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Funk, gospel, blues is all out of slavery times, out of depression, out of sorrow.
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You have to learn to get up from the table when love is not being served.
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I’m just human, I have faults like anyone.
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Music is the center of my life.
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Music is one of the ways by which you can know everything which is going on in the world. You can feel through music. Whew you can feel the vibrations of everybody in the world at any given moment.
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The 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.
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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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Since I was three I’ve been playing the piano. I’ve been onstage.
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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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Desegregation is a joke.
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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 think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I’m not going.
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I made wine from the lilac tree/Put my heart in its recipe/It makes me see what I want to see/And be what I want to be.
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It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution – real girl’s talk.
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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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What is love but a prelude to sorrow with heartache ahead for your goal.
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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 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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Birds flying high you know how I feel Sun in the sky you know how I feel Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel And this old world is a new world And a bold world For me And I’m feeling good I’m feeling good.
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My name sounds French but that’s just a stage name.
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How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?
NINA SIMONE