He was a brilliant, American rock guitarist, satirist, jazz musician, music producer, orchestral composer, innovative filmmaker, businessperson. Known as a workaholic, a perfectionist rock star who avoided the hippie culture for its conformism, spurious ideals, and drug use. Zappa worked in such jobs as a window dresser, copywriter, and door-to-door salesperson. With the money he earned from scoring Run Home Slow (1965) he purchased a recording studio.
Zappa testified before Congress in 1985 against rock music censorship, being appointed by Czechoslovakian president Václav Havel, as his Cultural Liaison Officer,
(1940 – 1993)
– Frank Zappa Quotes –
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.
~ Frank Zappa
Music is always a commentary on society.
~ Frank Zappa
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
~ Frank Zappa
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
~ 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
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
~ Frank Zappa
You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
~ Frank Zappa
Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.
~ Frank Zappa
A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
~ Frank Zappa
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.
~ Frank Zappa
All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.
~ Frank Zappa
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
~ Frank Zappa
Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
~ Frank Zappa
Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff.
~ Frank Zappa
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.
~ 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
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.
~ Frank Zappa
I searched for years I found no love. I’m sure that love will never be a product of plasticity.
~ Frank Zappa
Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
~ Frank Zappa
If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
~ Frank Zappa
Without deviation progress is not possible.
~ Frank Zappa
I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.
~ Frank Zappa
Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
~ 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
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
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
~ Frank Zappa
