Quotes from John Zorn

One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell.

I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way.

The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.

With all the fucked up things going on in the world, just the fact that we can wake up in the morning is kind of a miracle.

People sometimes have a very hard time accepting change.

You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.

I create work, and I devote myself to the creative process, and I try to, you know, stay pure in that process and be worthy of the messages that I receive.

I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.

When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.

I don't play favorites with people. My basic philosophy is that the only way to make the world a better place is by bringing something beautiful to every single person you run into at every moment of the day, so how can you play favorites with somebody?

Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now.

My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music.

I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing.

That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.

It breaks even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people who are working say, Look, I'll kick this back in, I don't need to take this profit share. It's very cooperative.

Music is about people for me. It's not about sounds. It's about people; it's about putting people into challenging situations. And for me, challenges are opportunities.

That's where I began to ask questions that maybe don't have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes.

I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.

It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge.

That is a lot of the reason I do what I do, to really spread the word and spread information and turn people onto different things they may not be, y'know, aware of. That is what Naked City is certainly about.

Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

Each record in the 'Book of Angels' series is meant to be unique in terms of the compositions.

I have no doubts. I know what gets in the way and I know what encourages me to do more work.

I mean I have had a very combative relationship with critics because I'm very impatient with people that don't give my work the respect I feel it deserves.