Quotes from Frank Zappa

A true Zen saying: Nothing is what I want.

Drugs will turn you into your parents.

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.

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. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

Anything Anytime Anyplace For No Reason At All (or AAAFNRAA)

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.

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.

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.

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

Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.

One size does not fit all.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Suddenly, books are arriving every day! So many books, so little time.

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

All your children are poor unfortunate victims of systems beyond their control