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 a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

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

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 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.

The extreme dynamic and percussive possibilities of an acoustic guitar amplified through a bridge pickup have, over many years of performing, informed not only the way I play, but the way I write and sing too. My guitar taught me to sing in textures, from the roundest lingering harmonic to the sharpest snap of a pulled string. Being a percussion instrument as well as a melodic instrument, my guitar also teaches me about the relationship between rhythm and melody. Portable. Did I mention it also taught me about being portable?

[On urging Nyro to tell Barbara Streisand that ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ had been personally written for her] It’s not a big lie.

Jazz musicians are the only workers who will put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

Music is to the soul what water is to the body.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

I’m creating music – it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.

Jazz music has always been a place where anything is possible.

To me, the guitar cuts through. It carries more than the organ, but the organ has got more guts.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

I am a devout musician.