Billy Corgan
The funny thing about me that most people never really understand is that, at heart, I'm really a jock.
Injuries are nothing to be ashamed about.
I've seen foreigners really shift on their view of America, and that's hard for me to take.
I still believe in my country.
You've got to be ready to be in a great relationship.
In our lives in a lot of ways it's all about fake. You've got people wanting things for fake reasons.
It's a simple formula for me now, I don't play any song I don't want to play.
I tend to be reactionary.
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 had such a big mouth for so long that it doesn't faze anybody anymore.
Indie world won't have me, and mainstream world treats me like an alien, but here I am still floating between these two worlds.
I look at other members of my generation who have basically done one thing, and one thing well, and have been handsomely rewarded for it.
I'm attacking the pomposity that says this is more valuable than that. I'm sick of that.
I was part of a generation that changed the world, and it was taken over by posers.
There's nothing wrong with technology. It's when technology is the story and not the artist, that's the problem.
We need to get back to a level of social responsibility that we haven't seen for a long time.
I'm just an artist. I can only do so much. I can only say so much.
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 mean there's certainly a lot of progressive rock and metal that exists at the underground level, which has its own vitality, as it should. But it seems to have lost its ability to really charge up the hill.
Rock in the mainstream culture has lost a lot of its mojo.
To be able to put your arms around 24 years of music, it's really fun.
My mother and I parting company at four years old is a recurring theme; although it's not symbolically necessarily present, it's present in all my relationships.
People try to make a big deal, like I don't want to play my old songs. That's not it. I don't want to play my old songs if that's my only option. That's a different thing.
The things I'm guided to do are really strange to me.
People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.
I think the days of working with producers in the conventional sense are over for me.
You just reach a point sometimes with somebody where it just doesn't work.
You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience.
You have to keep adapting to the times. If you kind of go with it, it can kind of fun.
These days you're not just competing with the tedium, you're competing with the cellphone.
I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.
I'm not interested in pop art.
Radiohead and Our Lady Peace are doing the seven layers of guitar, and I kind of jumped on that before anyone else did.
I don't want to be 25 again.
There are people out there who are older who are cool. I want that.
Music is your guide.
I'm a bit weird.
I'm a green-tea guy.
I mean, I'm certainly not a 'teaophyte,' or whatever the word would be.
I think rock & roll has prepared me for a lot of flexibility.
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 like my home and I like the nature.
I grew up in the suburbs and basically associate the suburbs with cultural death.
Wrestling is one of the last truly rebellious American things left.
I often have deer on my property and there's a fox and owls. You're not going to see that in the city.
Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years?
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.
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.
All I can go on is my own value system.