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.Collection: Romantic
Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.Collection: Music
How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express itCollection: Music
You don't have to live next to me / Just give me my equality.Collection: Giving
Music is an art and art has its own rules. And one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world, if you are going to be true to yourself. And if you don't do it - and you are an artist - it punishes you.Collection: Art
To be young, gifted and black!Collection: Black
I know I'm different, but I don't think about it.Collection: Thinking
I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live, as I've dreamed.Collection: Alive
I do not believe in mixing of the races. You can quote me. I don't believe in it, and I never have. I've never changed. I've never changed my hair. I've never changed my color, I have always been proud of myself, and my fans are proud of me for remaining the way I've always been. I married a white man one time, but he was a creepCollection: Believe
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.Collection: America
When I choose material for an album all these songs I grew up with pour into my head.Collection: Song
I'm a nut for Bach as a composer.Collection: Nuts
I can read and arrange, but I can't write.Collection: Writing
I don't like to go to strange places.Collection: Strange Places
I love to travel to hear different kinds of music.Collection: Different
I was reared in the church from the age of three. I've played piano since I was three. I performed at revivals and for my people around North Carolina for several years. People around town collected money to send me to school.Collection: School
By the time I was eight I was taking classical piano lessons and I wanted to be a concert pianist. But that didn't work out. I graduated from high school and my formal education ended.Collection: School
I can't stand loud guitars that make me deaf.Collection: Guitar
Theory and harmony broadened my mind in music. I know what music is made of.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Reality
My name sounds French but that's just a stage name.Collection: Names
Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was.Collection: Music
Since I was three I've been playing the piano. I've been onstage.Collection: Piano
When a child is gifted, people try to help that child.Collection: Children
I was not reluctant to become a singer. Singing has been an activity I've done my whole life, without thought.Collection: Singing
I don't like to go to strange places. I was in Italy for about five hours on my way to Africa.Collection: Strange Places
Since I was three I've been playing the piano. I've been onstage. My mother is an Evangelist and I used to play the piano at her revival meetings.Collection: Mother
I believe the time will come when the whole definition of pop music will change. It will get to the point where a song will not be a good song until it has a high level of creativity in writing and performance. In other words, in order to be popular, songs will have to meet these high standards.Collection: Song
Music is the center of my life.Collection: Music Is
The pressure of show business is on all the time and show business is a fickle business. Whatever is popular now - that's all that counts. I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I'm doing and why.Collection: Fickle
As I got older though I wanted a life of my own. The classical training was very demanding and thorough. It was a very sheltered existence. Even though I heard blues and gospel on the radio sometimes, it was always back to the piano and study and give recitals.Collection: Piano
If I get an idea I put it on tape and somebody else writes it out.Collection: Writing
I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.Collection: Drinking
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.Collection: Song
That's a very high goal to have, study eight hours a day to be a concert pianist.Collection: Eight
I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs... and good ones.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Somewhere Else
The Beatles are lucky, very lucky. But what has happened to them has nothing to do with them, in a sense. They came along at the right time. Attention was focused on them. They've had the chance to grow in almost any direction they wanted. Very lucky. They are not exceptionally talented.Collection: Lucky
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Music
I'm sorry that I did not become the world's first black classic pianist. I think I would have been happier.Collection: Sorry
Many times I feel different like a different person.Collection: Different
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band's lead singer, Eric Burdon. "So you're the honky," she said, "who stole my song and got a hit out of it?Collection: Music
As far as piano players are concerned, Oscar Peterson is my very favorite. I also like McCoy Tyner. I think that the big jazz stars, both now and in the past...how shall I say it? These guys are as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them. People don't know it yet. If jazz survives and is put on a pedestal as an art form, the same as classical music has been through the years, a hundred years from now the kids will know who they were, with that kind of respect.Collection: Art
The allusion was that I was actually naked. I loved that. It always, kind of shocked people enough that they became mine immediately.Collection: People
I look forward to doing my own show, not someone else's. That's always been my dream.Collection: Dream
Tomorrow, I might be in a different mood and you wouldn't recognize my voice.Collection: Voice
Music has been a burden and a joy for as long as I can remember.Collection: Long
I only knew classical music, which to me was the only true music. The only way I could survive at the bar was to mix the classical music with popular songs, and that meant I had to sing. What happened was that I discovered I had a voice plus the talent to mix classical music together with more popular songs, which at the time I detested.Collection: Music