Frank Zappa Quotes

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

“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 *sshole.”

“Children are naive — they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on love lyrics.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's better to have something to remember than anything to regret.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds good to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds bad to you, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like. American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like.”

“What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs – especially today – is the way they say: "Let's make love." What the f*ck kind of wussy says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go f*ck", or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank" – but you gotta say "Let's make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption, by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song.”

“When they get into drooling about love as a romantic concept – especially in the lyrics of sensitive singer/songwriter types – that's another shove in the direction of bad mental health.”

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

“You're a young kid and you hear all those love lyrics, right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your behaviour norms mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb f*cking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something.”