Frank Zappa Quotes

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

“Drugs will turn you into your parents.”

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

“Don't eat the yellow snow.”

“Nobody looks good with brown lipstick on.”

“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”

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

“The price of meat has just gone up and your old lady has just gone down.”

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

“The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you… and then, the worse things get.”

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

“Gail has said in interviews that one of the things that makes our relationship work is the fact that we hardly ever get to talk to each other.”

“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?”

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

“I think the music of the Fifties is really good. I suspect it’s much better musically than much of what’s available now. Not in terms of production, but in terms of content. One good believable song about some guy’s girlfriend and how they broke up — a sincere one — is better than twenty albums of English rock that’s ever been produced.”

“The things that were happening in 1955 were cosmic … in terms of music history.”

“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.”

“I think it's really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It's such an absurdity to take anything really seriously … I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what's the story here? Being alive is so weird.”

“So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there’s no way you’re gonna find out what it means.”

“You know, people are basically shitty. It’s when they prove it over and over again that it gets obnoxious.”

“Do you think you are protecting somebody by taking away seven words?”

“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.”

“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.”

“You're an asshole! You're an asshole!
That's right!
You're an asshole! You're an asshole!
Yes yes!”

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

“After all, he wrote this book here, and in the book it says he made us all to be just like him! So if we're dumb, then God is dumb — and maybe even a little ugly on the side.”

“Watch out where the huskies go,
and don't you eat that yellow snow.”

“Beauty is a pair of shoes that makes you wanna die.”

“You say your life's a bum deal 'n yer up against the wall. Well, people, you ain't even got no deal at all. 'Cause what they do in Washington. They just takes care of Number One. An' Number One ain't you. You ain't even Number Two!”

“There is no hell. There is only France.”

“When God created Republicans, he gave up on everything else.”

“To me, absurdity is the only reality.”

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

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

“On Ventura, there she goes
She just bought some bitch'n clothes
Tosses her head n flips her hair
She got a whole bunch of nothin in there”

“Every socialistic type of government… produces bad art, produces social inertia, produces really unhappy people, and it's more repressive than any other kind of government.”

“So I'm watchin' and I'm waitin'
Hopin' for the best
Even think I'll go to prayin'
Every time I hear 'em sayin'
That there's no way to delay
That trouble comin' every day
No way to delay
That trouble comin' every day”

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

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

“We're not talking light-hearted foolishness here — when we go for stupid we go for BIG STUPID — like people who shoot at you on the freeway, or the Rambos and Rambo-ettes who blow people away in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants with automatic weapons.”

“The biggest threat to America today is not communism. It's moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe … I really think that. … When you have a government that prefers a certain moral code derived from a certain religion and that moral code turns into legislation to suit one certain religious point of view, and if that code happens to be very, very right wing, almost toward Attila the Hun…”

“I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set.”

“Why should I smile when I'm sitting here with you?”

“Shes a valley girl
In a clothing store
Okay, fine…
Fer sure, fer sure.”

“The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the 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.”

“I've smoked ten marijuana cigarettes in my life, and probably the last time I had one near my face was twelve, fifteen years ago. And the reason I did was because, since I do smoke, people would say, "Here, smoke this, you'll get high." So I smoked it, and it gave me a sore throat and made me sleepy. And I must either presume that that's what high means, or something was wrong. But I've never had a positive result from smoking marijuana. It just wasn't my cup of tea. And I never used LSD, never used cocaine, never used heroin or any of that other stuff.”

“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.”

“And it's the same across the nation
Black and white discrimination
Yellin' "You can't understand me!"
'N all that other jazz they hand me
In the papers and TV and
All that mass stupidity
That seems to grow more every day
Each time you hear some nitwit say
He wants to go and do you in
Because the color of your skin
Just don't appeal to him
(No matter if it's black or white)
Because he's out for blood tonight.”

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