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I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.

Nikki Giovanni

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Nikki Giovanni
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: June 7
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni
Jr
Folk
Prefer
Period
Folks
Jazz
Periods
Much
Nina

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Black Americans should be given credit for finding probably the perfect weapon the weapon of the song. And that song continues. Most holocausts don't, so they have this bitterness left over. The phenomenon of the world, as far as Black Americans are considered, is that we are not a bitter people.
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If culture was a railroad, I can see the tracks running from the Spirituals to the Hip Hop Nation.
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Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself.
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Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.
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We have a world to conquer...one person at a time...starting with ourselves.
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The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
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My main strength as a young writer was that I had no fear of making mistakes. I knew I would and I knew I could and would learn from them.
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Who I really am keeps surprising me.
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I am totally fascinated by people and our history as I understand and continue to explore it. People have so much to give and so far to go and yet we have given and gone a great distance. It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.
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A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die.
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You're only as good as your last book.
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If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I want to do. It's not the same thing, but it's the best thing I can do.
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Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor those who struggle are middle class.
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School buildings should be opened and used twenty four hours a day.
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The nature of tragedy and accident is that we cannot predict.
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Libraries...house our dreams.
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We are better than we think and not yet what we want to be.
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You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.
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I am so hip even my errors are correct
Nikki Giovanni