Nina Simone Quotes

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.

When I first started making music, it was where I went when I couldn't express myself, when I wasn't able to connect with other people, when I couldn't talk about what I was going through.

I was bookish and awkward and wanted a means of expressing the millions of emotions flying around inside me. The piano seemed as good an outlet as any.

I loved musicals because I felt like breaking out in song makes so much sense to me because it's the stakes of how you feel inside!

My love affair with painting is bittersweet.

I think that the thing is, all those years of creating music or trying to express something of a dark shadow, an existential angst that I have felt most of my life and still feel today, to not be overwhelmed by it. Music, in a way, is a great vehicle, a means by which one can express all these somewhat contradictory feelings.

When I see 'Sunshine,' I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it's a really complicated film for me. And I've never been really able to resolve all that in myself.

Music moves my emotions because music loosens me up.

I don't try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

I have a lot of repression. So repression is what I make movies about.

Music has always been a great solace for me. It's still something that gives me far more joy than movies, I must say. I love movies, too. But somehow, music can transport you. There are so many different kinds of experiences you can have with music.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

When I sing, it's the most solitary state: just me, and the microphone, and the holy spirit. It's not about notes or scales, it's all about emotion.

Now, performing is second nature and I love every second of it. It is a very emotional thing when I can't play a song; maybe I'm hitting on something that I don't want to deal with. All of it is so personal. It is like therapy.

Everything I was feeling, all the hurt and the pain and the emotion I was going through, I put into my music.

I've always just had sort of a dark take on life, I suppose, and hopefully, the music transcends that in a way.

Music is there to access those dark emotional corners that we don't normally get too close to.

Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.

It was a really strange way that I came into music. Once I gave voice to it, the pit of emotions that I guess I knew was inside of me for a long time, the stream never really stopped.

Music makes your soul feel amazing while you're performing it.

These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that.

When I sing, I always relive a part of my life.

I think I write songs because of pent-up feelings.

I didn't never have to go to a therapist. I just always put it in a song and you heard me.