Frank Zappa Quotes

Famous Frank Zappa  Life Quotes

• “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.” 

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

• “If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” 

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

• “I have an important message to deliver to all the cute people all over the world. If you're out there and you're cute, maybe you're beautiful. I just want to tell you somethin' — there's more of us UGLY MOTHERFUCKERS than you are, hey-y, so watch out.”

• "Some people... Some people like cupcakes exclusively, while myself, I say there is naught nor ought. There be nothing so exalted on the face of God’s gray earth as that prince of foods… The muffin!"

• "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 theatre."

• "It's fairly obvious, since Richard Nixon, that there is no such thing as a fair deal for any voter in the United States -- You're just not gonna get it. It's a joke -- the people that you vote for, they're the next best thing to criminals. But of course they have money for advertising campaigns that make them look a little bit better than they actually are."

• "Basically I'm in the idea business -- whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands."

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

• "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."

• "Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass."

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

• "When God created Republicans, he gave up on everything else."

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

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

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

• “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.”

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

• “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.”

• "I'll tell you what classical music is, for those of you who don't know. Classical music is this music that was written by a bunch of dead people a long time ago. And it's formula music, the same as top forty music is formula music. In order to have a piece be classical, it has to conform to academic standards that were the current norms of that day and age..."

• "Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."

• "Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe."

• "Tobacco is my favorite vegetable."

• "There is no hell. There is only France."

• "Don't mind your make-up, you'd better make your mind up."

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

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

• "If we can't be free at least we can be cheap."

• "Sometimes you got to get sick before you can feel better."

• "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."

• "There will never be a nuclear war; there's too much real estate involved."

• "Consider for a moment any beauty in the name Ralph."

• "Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?"

• "Outdoors for me is walking from the car to the ticket desk at the airport"

• "You drank beer, you played golf, you watched football - WE EVOLVED!"

• "You have just destroyed one model XQJ-37 nuclear powered pansexual roto-plooker....and you're gonna have to pay for it."

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

• "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."

• "There are more love songs than anything else."

• "If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another."

• "Hey, you know something people? I'm not black, but there's a whole lots a times I wish I could say I'm not white."

• "There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish. The other two are growing on you!"

• "May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face."

• "Let's not be too rough on our own ignorance, it's what makes America great."

• "Beauty is a pair of shoes that makes you wanna die."

• "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."
• To me, absurdity is the only reality.

• My solos are speech-influenced rhythmically; and harmonically, they're either pentatonic, or poly-scale oriented. And there's the mixolydian mode that I also use a lot...But 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.

• Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?

• Rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, in order to provide articles for people who can't read.

• The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents — because they have a tame child-creature in their house.

• The essence of Christianity is told to 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. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.

• The first thing you have to do if you want to raise nice kids, is you have to talk to them like they are people instead of talking to them like they're property.

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

• I have four children, and I want them to grow up in a country that has a working First Amendment.

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

• 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.

• Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they're smart that amazes me. It's baffling whenever you find someone who's smart — incredible. Soon you'll have zoos for such things.

• I'm probably more famous for sitting on the toilet than for anything else that I do.

• I don't give a fuck if they remember me at all.

• Being interviewed is one of the most abnormal things that you can do to somebody else. It's two steps removed from the Inquisition.

• Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization — you can't just swallow it whole.

• Classical musicians go to the conservatories, rock´n roll musicians go to the garages.

• Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion?

• Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts

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

• On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.

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

• ”I think you should leave it up to the parent, because not all parents want to keep their children totally ignorant.

• Beware of the fish people, they are the true enemy.

• People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly 'strange names', but the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it is the last name that is going to get them in trouble.

• Information doesn't kill you.

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

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