Frank Zappa Quotes

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.

Andy Devine
had a thong rind
It was sublime
but the wrong kind
Have I aligned
with a blown mind?
Wasted my time
on a drawn blind?

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.

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.

A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.

"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?

If John Cage, for instance, says, "I'm putting a contact microphone on my throat, and I'm going to drink carrot juice, and that's my composition," then his gurgling qualifies as his composition because he put a frame around it and said so. "Take it or leave it, I now will this to be music." After that it's a matter of taste. Without the frame-as-announced, it's a guy swallowing carrot juice."

I'll take a drive to Beverly Hills
Just before dawn
An' knock the little jockeys
Off the rich people's lawn
An' before they get up
I'll be gone, I'll be gone
Before they get up
I'll be knocking the jockeys off the lawn

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

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

I love the guitar, always have. I can relate to it a lot better than a saxophone.

The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people. Most people are probably better off getting the certification they desire and spindling their lives away the way they’re doing. I don’t think they’d enjoy living any other way. There are millions of people who acquire all sorts of wonderful feelings from watching a football game and drinking a bottle of beer. It makes them really happy. Doesn’t do shit for me. But for them it’s life itself. As long as they can believe in the beer and the football, then they’ve really got something. And it’s probably more useful to them than religion. So why take it away? Why tell them what’s really going on? Let ’em be happy.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

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. 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.

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

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.