- 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.
- If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.
- A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
- Tax the FUCK out of the churches!
- I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.
- The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. "You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that."
- If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.
- Yeah, I tell them to change the channel if they see some guy in a brown suit with a telephone number at the bottom of the screen asking for money. [after being asked by Tipper Gore if there was anything on TV he didn't allow his kids to watch]
- The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
- Consider for a moment any beauty in the name Ralph. [on being asked by Joan Rivers why he gave his children such odd names]
- The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
- Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion?
- Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
- I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner? [in response to Tipper Gore's allegations that music incites people towards deviant behavior, or influences their behavior in general]
- 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.
- May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face. [to Mrs. Gore about parental advisory labels on album covers]
- Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?
- Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous. [at one of his trials, responding to a prosecuting lawyer who had quoted some of his lyrics which pertained to newts in a nightclub, after which which the lawyer said he found this image disturbing]
- 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.
- 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. Forget I mentioned it. This song has no message. Rise for the flag salute.
- The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.
- [On the album Hot Rats] The very idea! An instrumental album, except one vocal cut-and that had to feature Captain Beefheart!... Why are you wasting America's precious time with this, you asshole!
jul 11 2010 ∞
nov 12 2011 +
