When you have a single composer writing his work, it shouldn't be doled out in singles based on the length of a piece.

Frank [Zappa] was not a big fan of having lyrics, but sometimes he had things to say that lent themselves to lyrics.

Frank [Zappa]'s music was never for the mass audience. His music contains specific kinds of information that you won't find elsewhere in rock and roll.

Musicians more than most people are in the moment. That's the dual nature of that job.

I never dreamed that my future would be my husband's past. But it's such a huge past in terms of the recorded content.

The problem with composers is that they are the most unrequired job in America.

I think ingenuity is part of our DNA. That plus curiosity, plus the willingness to commit.

It's the ultimate identity theft when you start messing with somebody's work. Thinking that you could edit the work, or mix it differently, or re-EQ it, or make claims about it that aren't true.

Certainly Apple has improved enormously. At the beginning, the sampling rate was an issue for me, but a bigger argument was over digital rights, which I had.

Frank [Zappa] said he probably would have been a major criminal, given his brain power and his attention to detail, had he not been a composer. But being a composer is not something you can't help.

If you think about how long it takes to write a piece of music for an orchestra, it's outrageous to me, outrageous.

Fair words butter no parsnips.

I don't go through life verbalizing what I feel.

I do get nervous to act, it kind of depends on what it is really.

Being short works for me.

I'm a computer freak. I'm on the Internet every night. Sometimes I play dungeons and dragons with 15-year-old boys who think I'm a 15-year-old boy with a weird vocabulary.

All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.

The history of struggle is rich with stories of heroes and heroines - some of them leaders, some of them followers, all of them deserve to be remembered.

There is something that happens when you get emancipated. You approach life differently. You eat differently. You respect yourself more. You respect the gift you have been given.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

Everyone in this room knows that Venus is probably one of the greatest people on the tour. She's really great. She's super professional. Complete opposite of me.