Frank Zappa Quotes

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.

The poodle bites ; The poodle chews it.

Everything on this planet has something to do with music. Music functions in the realm of sculptured air. Polluted as our atmosphere might be, air is the thing that makes music work. Since all other things that occur in the sound domain are transmitted to the ear through that swirling mass, depending on how wide you want to make your definition, you could perceive quite a bit of human experience in terms of music.

I'm a conservative, and you might not like that, but I am, and the fact of the matter is, this bill that they're talking about in Maryland is stupid.

The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U.S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things.

The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced.

I consider that the building materials are exactly the same as what anybody else makes the thing out of. It's just the way they look at those materials is perhaps a narrower perspective. Time and those waves are at the disposal of anyone who wants to use them.

Well I think that progress is not possible without deviation. And I think that it's important that people be aware of some of the creative ways in which some of their fellow men are deviating from the norm, because in some instances they might find these deviations inspiring and might suggest further deviations which might cause progress, you never know.

I think that any artistic decision that is based on whether or not you are going to make money it is not really an artistic decision. It is a business decision. And there are a lot of things that I can do to earn a living and a lot of things that I have already done to earn a living which produce the amount of capital needed to do this project. I came here to spend money on an English orchestra and record my music, so I can take it home and I can listen to it. And... if somebody else likes that kind of stuff, I will make it available on a record so that they can hear it. That is my part of the public service of spending the money to make this event happen. No foundation grant, no government assistance, no corporation, no comittee. Just a crazy guy who spent the money to hire English musicians to do a concert at the Barbican and make an album for Barking Pumpkin Records.

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

Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow.

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

Socialism produces bad music, bad art, social stagnation and really unhappy people.

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

"Alright. Let's get realistic now. You know and I know that the function of that number was just to provide some sort of warm-up trash before we do something HEAVY. Something a little bit harder to listen to, but which is probably better for you in the LONG RUN. The item in this instance, which will be better for you in the LONG RUN, and if we only had a little more space up here we could make it visual for you, is "Some Ballet Music," which we've played at most of our concert series in Europe. Generally in halls where we had a little bit more space and Motorhead and Kansas could actually fling themselves across the stage, and give you their teenage interpretation of the art of The Ballet. I don't think it's too safe to do it here, maybe they can just hug each other a little bit and do some calisthenics in the middle of the stage."