So I don't think you have a choice, how can you be an artist and not reflect the times. That to me is the definition of an artist. - Nina Simone

Life is short. People are not easy to know. They're not easy to know, so if you don't tell them how you feel, you're not going to get anywhere, I feel.

Because of 'Porgy' people often compared me to Billie Holiday, which I hated. That was just one song out of my repertoire, and anybody who saw me perform could see we were entirely different. What made me mad was that it meant people couldn't get past the fact we were both black: if I had happened to be white nobody would have made the connection. And I didn't like to be put in a box with other jazz singers because my musicianship was totally different, and in its own way superior. Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be. It was a racist thing; 'If she's black she must be a jazz singer.' It diminished me, exactly like Langston Hughes was diminished when people called him a 'great black poet'. Langston was a great poet period, and it was up to him and him alone to say what part the colour of his skin had to do with that.

"You've got to learn to leave the table
When love's no longer being served".