Humorous Quotes from Frank Zappa's
The Real Frank Zappa Book

I think it is good that books still exist, but they make me sleepy.

Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. ~ Gustave Flaubert

I was born on December 21, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland. When I popped out, I was all back – they thought I was dead. I'm okay now.

I guess a lot of young boys think the drums are exciting, but it wasn’t my idea (at the age of 12) to be a rock and roll drummer or anything like that, because rock and roll hadn’t been invented yet.

Almost overnight we had jumped from starvation level to poverty level.

I detest ‘love lyrics.’ I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on ‘love lyrics.’

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.

I used to love putting little black dots on music paper. I’d sit for sixteen hours at a time, hunched over in a chair with a bottle of India ink, and draw beams and dots.

I don’t write ‘music on paper’ anymore. The incentive to continue was removed by having to deal with symphony orchestras.

Viola players are often failed violinists. Not too many people who play the viola chose it because they love the instrument – they get demoted to it.

This device (drum box or rhythm machine) is used by people with diagonal zippers on their clothes to provide the inflexible rhythms and obnoxious artificial hand-claps that cause Americans to ‘make the dancer face’...

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is sculpted into something. This ‘molecule-sculpture-over-time’ is then ‘looked at’ by the ears of the listeners – or a microphone.

My conducting ‘style’ (such as it is) lurks somewhere between nonexistent and massively boring.

“Conducting” is when you draw ‘designs’ in the nowhere – with a stick, or with your hands – which are interpreted as ‘instructional message’ by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.

(With the 1988 band) I didn’t have to play fifteen-minute guitar solos, and, really, there’s not much of a market for that anymore – the interest span of the audience has shriveled to about eight bars, and in those eight bars, you are expected to play every note you know.

I don’t have any pretensions about being a poet. My lyrics are there for entertainment purposes only – not to be taken internally.

One of the things I've said before in interviews is : "Without deviation (from the norm) 'progress' is not possible." In order for one to deviate successfully, one has to have at least a passing acquaintance with whatever norm one expects to deviate from.

When I was handed my first book and told to do the exercises, I hated the sound of the 'sample pages.' I studied them anyway. If something is hateful, you should atleast know what it is you're hating so you can avoid it in the future.

What a useless thing to spend money on – to take a course in college to learn how to be a modern composer! No matter how good the course is, when you get out, what the f*** will you do for a living?

One of the things that determines the curriculum in music schools is: which of the current fashions in modern music gets the most grant money from the mysterious benefactors in Foundation-Land.

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

We could improve worldwide mental health if we acknowledged that parents can make you crazy.

Parents have more to do with making their children weird than TV or rock and roll records. The only other thing that makes them weirder than TV and parents is religion and drugs.

Popular music tells us something about popular culture, which then tells us something about popular thought processes (or the absence thereof).

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice – there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be ale to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.

Corpo-wisdom dictates that if any one guy sells thirty million records, when the kids come into the store to buy The Big Hit, they’ll also pick up something else. This is called a “traffic-builder.” Ever wonder why every year at the Grammys one guy sweeps up all the awards?

“One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.” ~ Gustave Flaubert (letter to Madame Louise Colet, August 12, 1864)

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.

Maybe there’s a chemical in beer that stimulates the [male] brain to do violence while moving in the same direction as other guys who smell like them.

You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

“As you grow older in your observation of the peoples of this Earth world, it becomes more noticeable that stupidity is the reigning virtue. ~ Paul Twitchell, The Far Country.

Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.

Stupidity is replicating itself at an astonishing rate. It breeds easily and is self-financing.

When Hitler was doing his shit, a whole bunch of people thought he was terrific, too. How could they be wrong? There were so many of them; they thought they looked good together – their arms all went up at the same time.

I believe that U.S. schools have a Search and Destroy program, aimed at any hint of creative thinking exhibited by students.

People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly ‘strange names,’ but the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it’s the last name that is going to get them in trouble.

As far as rearing children goes, the basic idea I try to keep in mind is that a child is a person. Just because they happen to be a little shorter than you doesn’t mean they are dumber than you.

One reason people practice religion is that participation creates the illusion of belonging to an extended family. Whatever the Imaginary-Guy-In-The Clouds won't do for them (sometimes he’s busy – inventing crack; causing droughts; stirring up mischief here and there), their fellow parishioners might.

Guys who live on yachts purchased with the proceeds of bullet sales tend to feel awkward and out-of-place in the unemployment line. This often leads them to ingenious forms of ‘product promotion.

Politics Is the Entertainment Branch of Industry.

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn’t work.

In every language, the first word after "Mama" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" Asystem that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine" when you grow up, has - to put it mildly - a fatal design flaw.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Back to Humorous Quotes

Visit my other sites... www.exwz.com and www.jkjquotes.com