Frank Zappa Quotes

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.

~ Frank Zappa

So many books, so little time.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

The essence of Christianity is told 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.

~ Frank Zappa

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

~ Frank Zappa

Well, in this world of basic stereotyping, give a guy a big nose and some weird hair and he is capable of anything.

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

~ Frank Zappa

Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?

~ Frank Zappa

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.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

~ Frank Zappa

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

~ Frank Zappa

Music is always a commentary on society.

~ Frank Zappa

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

~ Frank Zappa

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

~ Frank Zappa

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

~ Frank Zappa

No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.

~ Frank Zappa