Billy Corgan Quotes

Somewhere between the intellectual idea of why we're attracted to certain things and the pragmatic reality is some form of ever-evolving truth.

I don't know if God would agree with me, but believing in God is kind of unimportant when compared to believing in yourself. Because if you go with the idea that God gave you a mind and an ability to judge things, then he would want you to believe in yourself and not worry about believing in him. By believing in yourself you will come to the conclusion that will point to something.

I often have deer on my property and there's a fox and owls. You're not going to see that in the city.

What most people do is try to find a comfortable persona that they're in alignment with and the public likes and appreciates them for.

Twenty-eight to 31 is the tough period. You have to be really careful because it's so cataclysmic, so life-altering. People do really dramatic things like get married, or they'll get divorced. Your chances of committing suicide go way up. It's basically psychic death. You see the signs of it around 27, and you're still on the out-end of it around 31. Everyone I've talked to who's gone through that and come out the other side walks out of it like, "MY LIFE IS GREAT".

I mean my point as an artist is I'm on my own little weird journey across the sky here and whether or not anybody's listening, or listening to the degree I would like them to, at the end of the day has to be an inconsequential thing because I can't chase this culture.

I feel like I'm always fighting not to repeat myself.

Saturn Return is just the return of your planets to their original position.

I think when I listen to old records, it puts me back in the atmosphere of what it felt like to make the record and who was there and what the room looked like. It's more a sensory memory.

I feel completely free to do whatever I want and how I want to do it. I feel unburdened by my past.

A missive to all you metal bands, the world is totally over the rock thing. Rock is deader than it's ever been.

I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.

Most of my arguments with musicians through the years have had more to do with their attitude about music, or their attitude about their own lives, or their personal responsibility. Music has never really been the big centerpiece of the fight.

All humans are part male and part female. The other side must be explored to gain complete understanding ofourselves and the world we live in. Forme, the idea of having a feminine perspective is a willingness to be vulnerable.

I had concussions as a kid playing football and basketball, and know what it feels like and to have someone say 'Just rub some dirt on it, and get back in there.'

People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.

In my case I don't mind playing a character that irritates people or makes people question my sanity.

Gish was the best representation of where we were at the time.

I'm definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it's not very productive to come in with nothing.

Music is 99% of my life. But I know I need a break. Besides, if you give people too much, they start to not want it. We need to restrain ourselves.

What bothers me is when music becomes entertainment. Of course, music is supposed to be entertaining, but go back to any period of time - music had a cultural significance on different levels, whether it was folk music, it was the news of the village, or it had to do with the rites of passage.

Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years?

I realize I'm a mirror.

Now the expectation is that, once the public decides that the artist is gentrified, the public demands that the artist stop growing. And [the public] actually puts all their energy into reasserting or re-establishing what the artist has long ago left behind. Because that's what they want. The source of creativity, the gift that's been given, be damned.

I was raised a Christian, but I wouldn't call myself a Christian now. I think when I was younger it was easier to focus on the negative, nihilist vision... this is sort of picking up on the other half of the body, which is God and white light.

You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience.

To re-embrace what I once loved about music has been a warming process for me, because it's a good, earned feeling now.

Around the mid-'90s every hair guy who would have been in a hair-metal band got his tattoos and suddenly decided he was alternative. It just became like a thing.

The title of a song is like the wrapping on a present.

I'm prepared to spend the rest of my life playing clubs, if that means I'm playing music that I believe in.

For a 6-foot-3 guy with no hair and a whiny voice, I've done all right.

We don't make music for people to take drugs to, we make music for people to live their life.

The music business - and I guess you could say any artistic endeavor - usually rewards those who are on the leading edge of where everything is going, but you can't be too far.

I created a paradigm by which I could succeed, and up until recently it was the only way I could do it. I could not take the brunt of standing in the light of my own work. There was a Faustian bargain I could not make. I could have you mock me for wearing funny clothes that I could deal with. But I couldn't deal with actually standing in the light of my own musical power. That's the difference now. It's like, okay, no more of that, you're done.

A good artist is willing to die many times over. What's funny is, I've died so many times.

Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock.

I never seemed to fit in. But it made me try to strive for things ten times harder.

More than any audience in the world, Americans will cross their arms, stare at you and say, 'OK, whaddya got?' - no matter how many times you've proven it to them.

That was a terrible Super Bowl, I have to say. I mean you got the big Peyton Manning walk off into the sunset win, but what a shnoozo.

I'm an experimental artist in a field that doesn't celebrate experimentation. It celebrates self-destruction, which I guess you could say is a creative endeavor.

I've always believed that we could reach past genre -- we didn't ride the grunge coat-tails; we've always been on our terms.

Rock & roll is not about what you play, it's about how you play it.

When alternative music - which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of where white rock is headed - becomes either too cute or too manufactured, that's just really not good.

The deeper I get into my life as a musician, I'm discovering that it becomes less and less about other people, and more about what I want to do. And that's a good place to be.

I put up with the music business because I understand that I'm in the tradition, I'm in a tradition that's of far greater importance than the business I seem to be in. Everywhere I go in the world, people ask me about the business that I seem to be in, but I'm not really in that business.

We have a problem with any labels that people try to hang on us, because all it does is drag you down.

Calm, open debate, and logical thought drive strength to its maximum effectiveness.

Usually the intention of the artistic effect is too sophisticated for most people to understand, sort of like a joke that they don't get so they don't think it's funny.