Frank Zappa quotes:

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  • You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

  • The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

  • Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

  • There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.

  • If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

  • The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

  • I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

  • It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

  • Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

  • There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

  • The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.

  • The whiskers sticking up from underneath his pancake makeup, and yet he was a beautiful lady.

  • I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Politics Is the Entertainment Branch of Industry. C-SPAN's coverage of governmental proceedings is wonderful. Caution! Buffoons on the Hill! Wallowing in blabber and spew, regiments of ex-lawyers and used-car salesmen attempt to distract us from the naughty little surprises served up by deregulated corporate America.

  • If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

  • Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

  • On the Planet of Baritone women, they talk low.

  • Conducting" is when you draw "designs" in the nowhere-with a stick, or with your hands-which are interpreted as "instructional messages" by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.

  • Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

  • It is always advisable to be a loser if you cannot become a winner

  • My school spirit is at an all time low, I'm losing my status at the school.

  • There's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.

  • The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.

  • Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not.

  • Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST.

  • My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

  • The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

  • A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.

  • You is what you am, a cow don't make ham.

  • Yeah, I tell them to change the channel if they see some guy in a brown suit with a telephone number at the bottom of the screen asking for money.

  • A drug is neither moral nor immoral - it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole.

  • You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

  • If classical music is the state of the art, then the arts are in a sad state.

  • No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.

  • Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

  • A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

  • The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

  • The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe!

  • The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own.

  • Hey ugly folks, go get some cyanide and die.

  • Look here brother, who you jivin' with that cosmik debris?

  • Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity.

  • Without deviance from normality, there can be no progress.

  • Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

  • I'm the devil's advocate. We have our own worshipers.

  • Find her, blind her, see who designed her. Act like a dummy until you grind her.

  • The typical rock fan is not smart enough to know when he is being dumped on.

  • Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

  • The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar; now that's my idea of a good time.

  • Do we really want to know how Michael Jackson makes his music? No. We want to understand why he needs the bones of the Elephant Man -- and, until he tells us, it doesn't make too much difference whether or not he really is ''bad.

  • Give me the enchilada with the pickle sauce shoved up between the donkey's ass.

  • There is no hell. There is only France.

  • Interviewer: 'So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?' Frank Zappa: 'You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?

  • All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

  • I am the slime oozing out from your TV set. You will obey me while I lead you, and eat the garbage while I feed you.

  • The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on.

  • Nobody gives a crap if we're great musicians.

  • Power will be maintained by the groovy guy or gal who gets the most media coverage for his sleaze. Naturally, his friends in various businesses will do okay, too.

  • Out on a 30 day tour, you got nothing, but groupies and promoters to love you.

  • If you really love guitar, you're going to spend every waking hour stroking the thing.

  • Tighten my headband for an extra rush.

  • She is an office girl, her name is Betty. Her favorite group is Helen Reddy.

  • I knew Jimi (Hendrix) and I think that the best thing you could say about Jimi was: there was a person who shouldn't use drugs.

  • Watch out where the Huskies go And don't you eat that yellow snow

  • I want a girl that can swallow my pride.

  • The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that.

  • The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life.

  • Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

  • Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

  • Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.

  • If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they'll murder you in your sleep.

  • We was on our way to fame, got matching suits and Beatle boots.

  • America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here and abuse the Indians.

  • I think love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America.

  • I proceeded to take that mitten full of the deadly yellow snow crystals and rub it all into his beady little eyes with a vigorous circular motion.

  • Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear.

  • She lives in Mojave in a Winnebago. His name is Bobby, he looks like a potato.

  • The whole music business in the United States is based on numbers, based on unit sales and not on quality. It's not based on beauty, it's based on hype and it's based on cocaine. It's based on giving presents of large packages of dollars to play records on the air.

  • It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralise the long-range effects of our national stupidity

  • The universe consists of 5% protons, 5% neutrons, 5% electrons and 85% morons.

  • Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous.

  • It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.

  • I would say that today, dishonesty is the rule, and honesty the exception. It could be, statistically, that more people are honest than dishonest, but the few that really control things are not honest, and that tips the balance.

  • A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.

  • I searched for years I found no love. I'm sure that love will never be a product of plasticity.

  • Left me here to cry alone with a bottle of juice and pork chop bone.

  • The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow J on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?

  • Ram it up your poop chute.

  • Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned--I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture, or necrodestination.

  • You can't be a real country unless you have a beer.

  • As far as rearing children goes, the basic idea I try to keep in mind is that a child is a person. Just because they happen to be a little shorter than you doesn't mean they are dumber than you.

  • The kerosene record player is not a very efficient device.

  • Guitar playing, as currently understood, has more to do with sports than it does to do with music. It's an Olympic challenge type of situation. The challenges are in the realm of speed, redundancy, choreography, and grooming... ...clouds of educated gnat-notes.

  • Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.

  • The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.

  • Rock music was never written for or performed for conservative tastes.

  • The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway.

  • Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

  • Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.

  • There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it.

  • I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?

  • I like to watch the news, because I don't like people very much and when you watch the news ... if you ever had an idea that people were really terrible, you could watch the news and know that you're right.

  • Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible. -Frank Zappa, composer, musician, film director (1940-1993)

  • Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read.

  • For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.

  • A true Zen saying: "Nothing is what I want.

  • I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.

  • They were wearing smelly blankets, they looked like Donovan fans.

  • I'm more interested in melodic things. I think the biggest challenge when you go to play a solo is trying to invent a melody on the spot.

  • You can't escape the puking sphinx.

  • The devil, he's about this big. He had a red suit on and a widow's peak, and then a pointed tail, and like a sulfur reek. Yes, it was him alright, I swear.

  • The plumber he says, never flush a tampon. This is great information, cost me half a weeks pay.

  • Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple; you're going to be as smart as God." We can't have that.

  • Moving to Montana soon, gonna be a dental floss tycoon.

  • One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

  • Elvis has left the building to climb up that heavenly stair. So what if he looks like a wart-hog in heat?

  • A wise man once said, never discuss philosophy or politics in a disco environment.

  • Wisdom is not the domain of the Wiz.

  • Don't eat the yellow snow.

  • Roller-skates and disco are a lot of fun, I'm much too young and stupid to operate a gun.

  • I think the anti-smoking business is a yuppie invention-an extension of the concept that "we'll always be young, rich, and healthy.

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