Top 306 Quotes & Sayings by Billy Corgan - Page 5

We're the worst band in America... That makes us the best.

We are the most beloved and hated band in the world.

If you've sold over a million records, you are not punk rock, you are milking the system for everything that it's worth.

The point is to let the music be itself. If it doesn't mean anything to you, then it's bullsh*t.

What has gone on in my childhood, and the personal problems that we've had in the band, have given a lot of people hope. (It shows) if you keep your nose pointed straight you can actually get somewhere -- to a happy place.

I dont think we're the type of band people look at and say, 'I want to grow up to be just like that'. We're like a train wreck.

You can only be this high-powered mojo rock band for so long, then you just can't look people in the eye. So, we've projected our own demise.

The closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets.

I've become a guy who's like a complaining, whining neurotic.

I want to make great songs.

People always called the Cure gloomy, but listening to the Cure made me happy. There was something about the gloominess that gave me comfort, and I think we're the same way.

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.

The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. It was going to either be a big band, or a no band.

Smashing Pumpkins has never been a band about hit songs.

There's been someone up here screaming 'Landslide' for the whole show... Normally we don't play 'Landslide,' but on occasion we've been known to play it... So since this person's been screaming it all show long... That just about kills the chances of me playing it tonight, or ever again.

I'm like the Fugitive, running from the one-armed indie-rock community!

My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that I wasn't like other children.

People act like Nirvana invented grunge; they just took it and personified it.

When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before.

I get more out of life just being myself, by just being a human being. Not by being a rock star, not by being whatever. Sometimes I act like a jerk, but I think people respect me for being myself. That's the ultimate thing about the Smashing Pumpkins.

I'm not going to die glamorously. I'll probably be eating a Twinkie, take a bite, and fall over.

In 1992, with the weight of a perceived world on our shoulders, we disappeared into a parking garage to write the songs that would change the course of our lives forever. 'Siamese Dream' represents all of our dreams coming true, while the dreams of a happy band fell apart.

As a 28 year old who's lived long enough to know the difference, I know now that the feelings I felt an 16 were not necessarily correct. But however overly dramatic, the desperation and hopelessness I felt at 16 was my reality.

We were just a little immature in the past. I think we actually wanted to create difficult situations for ourselves just to be able to use that emotion for stimulation.

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

I've thought many times, 'I can't write this,' but on my own little planet I found the courage to write it because it was true. I put aside fear of Father being angry with me. It's hard though; the world pales in comparison with the stature of a parent. In some small-consolation way, my parents feel I'm helping people by giving them something to identify with. They feel proud in a sort of reverse way. My mom's proud of the fact that lots of kids look up to me.

Stay in school. Lie to your teachers, but stay in school.

I want to be able to look back and think that as long as I was going this, I did the best that I could.

I'm Irish and I was born on St. Patrick's Day. I'm lucky sevens.

Everything about life makes me lonely.

I think the original, 'They're the next Jane's Addiction' things that people said about us in the beginning have been pretty much wiped out.

It's what the mainstream does - they absorb things and they blunt the power of it. And so the next generation and the next generation has to become more shocking and more provocative in order to get any rise out of anybody.

It's wonderful to read interviews by old blues guys - they talk about all their influences, they talk about who taught them how to play, and who they saw, and how they were determined to play that way.

If I had spent fourteen months in a small room with Jesus, I'd want to fist fight with him.

Being overly identified with [a certain period of time] becomes a noose around your neck, and people don't want you to grow up, they don't want you to change, they don't want you to evolve.

If there was a simple ethic for the band, it was that we want to be able to do whatever we want to do.

This is not a reaction against a negative world. It's a response to a negative world.

When you present people with things from the heart and from the soul, they make better choices: They make better choices about their bodies, they make better choices about their partners, they make better choices about the environment.

Live simply; make compassionate choices when it comes to food.

I really think it's a white, bourgeois idea to pretend that you don't have influences. It seems to be the obsession strictly of white people in college.

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.

Not let the child run the circus, just have that child be the source of the creative voice.

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.

As far as a theoretical point of view for my generation, I'm probably the most successful theoretician. I mean, double albums and concepts and dresses and major disasters and wonderful successes and yet you don't see the critical review of my work. Why? Because it's all focused on the persona. Billy Corgan. But I get to sort of jump in and be Billy Corgan. But then I get to sort of jump back out and be like, sensitive man in the corner.

Everybody I'm working with now is a friend. And I would be very, very remiss to work with anybody in the future who has not shown me who they really are.

The reason I don't play any of the old songs is because I really honor my old band, and I think that those songs are best served within the context of that band.

It's about the girlfriend who left me last year. I tried to put all my anger in those words, even though I'm just as much to blame for the break-up. 'Soma' is based on the idea that a love relationship is almost the same as opium: it slowly puts you to sleep, it soothes you, and gives you the illusion of sureness and security. Very deceivable.

It was shocking to see Nirvana play, because it was like, "Here's this little guy with a monster-guitar sound." And it was heavier than Black Sabbath. That was shocking.

I think I kind of approached music with this sort of, like, weird thing where I kinda set myself up where I could kinda be myself but not really. I kinda had a backdoor out. So if you criticized me, I kinda had my defenses working. And the problem is that some people seize on that as inauthenticity, which is understandable. So that's painful because it's not that you're being inauthentic...there's a difference between being a poseur and being someone who's so emotionally challenged they're kind of just doing their best to show you what they've got.

That's the great thing about rock n' roll: the myth is ultimately more important than the reality. And that's what you learn - you just learn to go with the mythology.

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.

I met Scott Stapp when the band was first coming up, great guy. I haven't seen him for years, but a great guy.

I think it would be very interesting to see that many people would probably be okay with paying more for services and goods that they felt were more holistically [generated]. Which means the death of the old system which rewarded people for taking advantage of one another.

Billy [Corgan] and I used to spend quite a lot of time together in Los Angeles, when I first moved there.

There's a lot of UFO sightings in New Orleans, which isn't really too surprising. There's a lotta crazy people there. The people there lack the intelligence to know what they are seeing, so that's why the UFO's go there.

About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.

I reached a point in my life where I felt like I was living through some old character.

Today is the greatest Day I've ever known Can't live for tomorrow, Tomorrow's much too long.

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

As a healthy person, my breakfasts are very bland and boring. Think kind of a white pasty gruel. Or there can be an occasional banana over the top.