Top 40 Don Van Vliet Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Be kind, man – don’t be mankind.”

— Don Van Vliet

2. “There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers.”

— Don Van Vliet

3. “I don’t want to sell my music. I’d like to give it away because where I got it, you didn’t have to pay for it.”

— Don Van Vliet

4. “A carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond.”

— Don Van Vliet

5. “If you want to be a different fish, you’ve got to jump out of the school.”

— Don Van Vliet

6. “You can tell by the kindness of a dog how a human should be.”

— Don Van Vliet

7. “I’d never just want to do what everybody else did. I’d be contributing to the sameness of everything.”

— Don Van Vliet

8. “If you got ears, you gotta listen.”

— Don Van Vliet

9. “The stars are matter, We’re matter, But it doesn’t matter.”

— Don Van Vliet

10. “We see the moon, don’t we? So it’s our eye. Animals see us, don’t they? So we’re their animals.”

— Don Van Vliet

11. “I don’t like getting out when I could be painting. And when I’m painting, I don’t want anybody else around.”

— Don Van Vliet

12. “I would say that it’s an awfully overrated aspirin and very similar to the old people’s Disneyland.”

— Don Van Vliet

13. “James Brown is important because he decorates the clock correctly and he’s good with lower mathematics. Don’t get me wrong – he’s good.”

— Don Van Vliet

14. “Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt.”

— Don Van Vliet

15. “An audience can really lift you right up off the stage.”

— Don Van Vliet

16. “I don’t do lullabyes.”

— Don Van Vliet

17. “Art is rearranging and grouping mistakes.”

— Don Van Vliet

18. “When I see a dolphin, I know it’s just as smart as I am.”

— Don Van Vliet

19. “I think people have had too much to think and ought to flex their magic muscles. It takes awhile to get oriented to what I do, but people seem to be able to hear it if they give it a chance. I’d never just want to do what everybody else did. I’d be contributing to the sameness of everything.”

— Don Van Vliet

20. “I don’t even know what sound is, much less what it’s for. It isn’t to make money that’s for sure. I’ve never made any.”

— Don Van Vliet

21. “I’m interested in playing, not working.”

— Don Van Vliet

22. “The largest living land mammal is the absent mind.”

— Don Van Vliet

23. “I live in a Mobile Home – I’ve never had a house, except once; I rented a log cabin.”

— Don Van Vliet

24. “I have no neighbours other than animals and Joshua Trees.”

— Don Van Vliet

25. “I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.”

— Don Van Vliet

26. “I would never kill a living thing, although I probably have inadvertently while driving automobiles.”

— Don Van Vliet

27. “I don’t look like a desert person because I stay indoors most of the day and fool around at night. That’s what the desert animals do – they don’t have a tan either.”

— Don Van Vliet

28. “You can almost judge how screwed up somebody is by the kind of toilet paper they use. Go in any rich house and it’s some weird coloured embossed stuff.”

— Don Van Vliet

29. “I don’t think artists are made, I think they’re born.”

— Don Van Vliet

30. “I think most people try to get others to see through their eyes.”

— Don Van Vliet

31. “With my voice and my band, I can do anything.”

— Don Van Vliet

32. “I think that men has the most highly developed intelligence. I think men get so intelligent that they’re stupid.”

— Don Van Vliet

33. “It makes me itch to think of myself as Captain Beefheart. I don’t even have a boat.”

— Don Van Vliet

34. “That Sid Vicious was obviously a schizophrenic, kind of a mean one too.”

— Don Van Vliet

35. “The wind is a very difficult sound to get. It’s always changing.”

— Don Van Vliet

36. “We’re all colored, or you wouldn’t be able to see anyone.”

— Don Van Vliet

37. “I’d rather play a tune on a horn, but I’ve always felt that I didn’t want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you’ve got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it’s better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.”

— Don Van Vliet

38. “I needed to purge myself of all the attention my parents had given me – I wasn’t neglected enough as a child.”

— Don Van Vliet

39. “Johnny Rotten. He’s a big fan of mine. I used to see him out in the audience in England and he’d stand up and holler. He’s funny. Smart too, and a nice guy. Don’t think he’s a jerk because he isn’t.”

— Don Van Vliet

40. “Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.”

— Don Van Vliet

41. “But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I’ve looked outside and seen people starving to death.”

— Don Van Vliet

42. “The way I keep in touch with the world is very gingerly, because the world touches too hard.”

— Don Van Vliet