I would like a man now who is rich, and who can give me a boat - a sailboat. I want to own it and let him pay for it. My first love is the sea and water, not music. Music is second.
As a political weapon, it has helped me for 30 years defend the rights of American blacks and third-world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs. To move the audience to make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world.
What I was interested in was conveying an emotional message, which means using everything you've got inside you sometimes to barely make a note, or if you have to strain to sing, you sing.
I try to swim every damn day I can, and I've learned to scuba dive and snorkel.
I wasn't a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.
This may be a dream, but I'll say it anyway: I was supposed to be married last year, and I bought a gown. When I meet Nelson Mandela, I shall put on this gown and have the train of it removed and put aside, and kiss the ground that he walks on and then kiss his feet.
All the time, there was the weight of my community's expectations on my shoulders.
When I'm on that stage, I assume honor. I assume compensation, and I should.
You feel the shame, humiliation, and anger at being just another victim of prejudice, and at the same time, there's the nagging worry that maybe... you're just no good.
I'm not a blues singer, I'm a diva.
I think the rich will eventually have to cave in too, because the economic situation around the world is not gonna tolerate the United States being on top forever.
I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: 'You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.
Desegregation is a joke.
I think that the artists who don't get involved in preaching messages probably are happier - but you see, I have to live with Nina, and that is very difficult.
When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
My daughter is in more competition with me. I never wanted to be bigger than my mother or to challenge her.
I want to shake people up so bad, that when they leave a nightclub where I've performed, I just want them to be to pieces.
I didn't get interested in music. It was a gift from God.
I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I'm not going.
From the beginning, it has been a no-no for a black man to touch a white woman.
