Quotes by Billy Corgan

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

"To be able to put your arms around 24 years of music, it's really fun."

"When you actually like each other, it translates to the music."

"In a weird kind of way, music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me."

"I did 13-something years of talking to wrestlers and promoters about why they did certain things and why they booked matches a certain way and what they were thinking and whether they were satisfied with the draw. And I got a lot of insight in the business."

"I'm not interested in pop art."

"The ideology of the Smashing Pumpkins was ultimately more valuable than the music of the Smashing Pumpkins. That's what critics can't put their finger on."

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

"Music is your guide."

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

"Your basic person wants to talk about material culture, internet culture. I think about God, cats, nature."

"I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It's a journey of recovery. It's a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It's already there."

"Like any good tree that one would hope to grow, we must set our roots deep into the ground so that what is real will prosper in the Light of Love."

"I like my home and I like the nature."

"The funny thing about me that most people never really understand is that, at heart, I'm really a jock."

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

"I was trying to be this person who is cool, eternally rocking."

"There are people out there who are older who are cool. I want that."

"In my particular instance, I came from a family that didn't have anything. Everything I earned in life I made. Myself. With songs that I wrote."

"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."

"You've got to be ready to be in a great relationship."

"I've always been spiritual but I've never had a proper context, and it took me awhile to find the proper context. It's hard to realize you can have any kind of relationship with God you want... and so I now have a punk rock relationship with God."

"I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity."

"Jesus teaches us to forgive and I've got to trust him on that one."

"The desire to hit a big home run is dominating the music business."

"You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that's the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's the American story, again and again."

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

"There's nothing wrong with technology. It's when technology is the story and not the artist, that's the problem."

"One thing I've learned to appreciate as I've gotten a little older is direct forms of communication."

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

"I'm sort of like a lame, single guy in a red sports car."

"I do not trust those who make the vaccines, or the apparatus behind it all to push it on us through fear."

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

"If I have resistance to something, it means there's something wrong. The resistance to me is a sign of fear."

"For someone who's had the level of success I've had, there's been very little critical review of my work, which is pretty fascinating."

"Radiohead and Our Lady Peace are doing the seven layers of guitar, and I kind of jumped on that before anyone else did."

"I grew up in the suburbs and basically associate the suburbs with cultural death."

"Rock and Roll is still asking people like me to live up to the old guard's concept of what success is but it doesn't mean anything."

"We've turned into a whining society."