Billy Corgan
If you're really going to uncover something as an artist, you're going to come into access with parts of your personality and your psyche that are really uncomfortable to face: your own ambition, your own greed, your own avarice, your own jealousies, and anything that would get in the way of the purity of your own artistic voice.Collection: Ambition
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.Collection: Entertainment
That's the real endeavor: to try to create that direct conduit from the pure consciousness of your creative voice to the person who's a craftsman who can go into the world and consistently deliver new things worth paying attention to.Collection: Real
We love cats more than we love women [with Marilyn Manson].Collection: Cat
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".Collection: Suicide
I don't like that the government is going to manipulate the information to try to convince me that what I'm eating is not what I'm really eating. If people choose to eat cardboard because it's ten cents cheaper, then let them. That's at the root of freedom. But in the reverse, I'd like to know if what I'm eating or consuming or buying is somehow hurting or exploiting someone in another part of the planet.Collection: Hurt
We had a wonderful time with this kind of grunge awareness, where suddenly rock was cool again. People wanted to head loud guitars. It was a great time, and I'm glad we were there. But the gimmick part has worn off.Collection: Rocks
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.Collection: Thinking
I'm Irish and I was born on St. Patrick's Day. I'm lucky sevens.Collection: Lucky
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Mom
I rummage around in artistic things from the past. If you don't understand the context, they wouldn't make any sense. I rummage around in conceptual ideas of the future, but if you don't know the source of the thinking, [it] wouldn't make any sense.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Growing Up
Live simply; make compassionate choices when it comes to food.Collection: Choices
We're both cat lovers [with Marilyn Manson].Collection: Cat
The mythology in rock n' roll is that I'm a bit of a loose cannon. Yet I've produced more music than anybody in my generation. So how much of a loose cannon am I? But the general public believes that I'm a loose cannon, so let them believe it. I'm not going to correct them.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Guitar
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.Collection: Would Be
I feel completely free to do whatever I want and how I want to do it. I feel unburdened by my past.Collection: Past
It makes me crazy to think that somebody might attack my city or any other city.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Sunset
I met Scott Stapp when the band was first coming up, great guy. I haven't seen him for years, but a great guy.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Reality
Not let the child run the circus, just have that child be the source of the creative voice.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Tattoo
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Crazy
The Killer in me is the Killer in you.Collection: Song
People always seemed to pay attention to us. I have no idea why -- there was just a presence between the four people or something.Collection: Ideas
We weren't like mates who decided to form a band. The other three met me because they were interested in being in the band that I was starting.Collection: Three
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.Collection: Reality
We can look you in the eye and talk to you about life, heart, love rock'n'roll, whatever, but we do not have the moral authority to tell people how to vote or what to do with their bodies. We are just a rock band.Collection: Heart
In my Corgan brain, I've decided it's almost as simple as 'All you need is love.' Almost.Collection: Simple
Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock.Collection: Motivation
We are the most beloved and hated band in the world.Collection: Band
The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too.Collection: Thinking
I'm a Pisces, and Pisces have this weird inability to be completely spontaneous. We're too conscious of our actions. I've always been way too sensible for my own good.Collection: Inability
My view of the world is always tempered by the fact that there are people who are less fortunate than I am.Collection: Views
Today is the greatest Day I've ever known Can't live for tomorrow, Tomorrow's much too long.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Girlfriend
This is not a reaction against a negative world. It's a response to a negative world.Collection: Negative
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.Collection: Thinking
If you've sold over a million records, you are not punk rock, you are milking the system for everything that it's worth.Collection: Rocks
I've become a guy who's like a complaining, whining neurotic.Collection: Guy
We have a problem with any labels that people try to hang on us, because all it does is drag you down.Collection: People