Nina Simone

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 creep.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.

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.

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 it.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

I would like you to know, I am a doctor of music.

I can’t understand guys who just have to have your autograph. What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I’m about to get.

What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder and I don’t even notice.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

The true beauty of music is that it connects people.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

When Bird came on the scene, it was shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark and then there was light.