Top 100 Billy Corgan Quotes
#1. When I had a job catering, I catered a wedding for the Smashing Pumpkins bassist in Indiana. And I served Billy Corgan shrimp off a tray.
Amy Poehler
#2. 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.
Billy Corgan
#3. The funny thing about me that most people never really understand is that, at heart, I'm really a jock.
Billy Corgan
#4. I don't think '90s music was as significant as '60s music in terms of changing the world, but it was significant, and I think it was similarly disillusioning when you realize the mainstream just
Billy Corgan
#5. 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.
Billy Corgan
#6. Jesus teaches us to forgive and I've got to trust him on that one.
Billy Corgan
#8. It makes me crazy to think that somebody might attack my city or any other city.
Billy Corgan
#9. 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.
Billy Corgan
#10. As a citizen of the great city of Chicago, I find it impossible to root against the White Sox. The White Sox organization has been much more consistent, in my lifetime at least, at putting a winning ballclub on the field.
Billy Corgan
#11. And the world so hard to understand is the world you can't live without.
Billy Corgan
#12. I mean, I'm certainly not a 'teaophyte,' or whatever the word would be.
Billy Corgan
#13. This is not a reaction against a negative world. It's a response to a negative world.
Billy Corgan
#15. My father was a guitar player, and I was raised with a super high standard of what good guitar playing was.
Billy Corgan
#17. James, that's a bad situation. I'm not saying it's not repairable, but it's pretty far. When you go from being in one of the best bands in the world to some cover band ... as far as I'm concerned, he was playing down at the pub.
Billy Corgan
#18. I have a hard time thinking of men trying to sing my songs, because I think my perspective is definitely feminine.
Billy Corgan
#19. Been there, done that, seen it, heard it, pissed on it.
Billy Corgan
#20. 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.
Billy Corgan
#21. I don't have any sentimental notion about how people are going to remember me.
Billy Corgan
#22. My pat line about the Cubs and payroll is that the amount of merchandise the Cubs would sell off a world series championship would more than cover for a big payroll.
Billy Corgan
#23. I had such a big mouth for so long that it doesn't faze anybody anymore.
Billy Corgan
#24. Ultimately, running a band is about the relationships you have with people.
Billy Corgan
#25. Saturn Return is just the return of your planets to their original position.
Billy Corgan
#26. If I had spent fourteen months in a small room with Jesus, I'd want to fist fight with him.
Billy Corgan
#27. 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.
Billy Corgan
#28. I've been too productive for too long, and despite what anybody wants to strip away from me, I am influential. I am.
Billy Corgan
#29. That's at the root of the human interaction: fair trade.
Billy Corgan
#30. Life is everything and nothing all at once.
Billy Corgan
#31. 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.
Billy Corgan
#32. I don't have to play by these rules or do these things ... I can actually have my own kind of version.
Billy Corgan
#33. 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.
Billy Corgan
#35. It's a simple formula for me now, I don't play any song I don't want to play.
Billy Corgan
#36. We're the worst band in America ... That makes us the best.
Billy Corgan
#37. You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience.
Billy Corgan
#38. I've had a lot of things rendered as not being effective or as some indication of my lack of sanity, only to be praised ten, fifteen, twenty years later for what I did once in this overt consciousness.
Billy Corgan
#39. I'm passionate about creating new systems that are more holistic to humankind. What do I mean by that? I mean, create new systems of business so that people with ethics both exploit their goods and their gifts while not exploiting the earth, exploiting one another.
Billy Corgan
#40. My version, of course, is not this flag-waving, let's all get on the Jesus train and ride out of hell. I'm not that kind of guy. It's an embrace that life is good, worth living and yeah, it's not easy, but there are more pluses than minuses.
Billy Corgan
#41. 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.
Billy Corgan
#42. I don't have a problem with 'Idol' or 'X Factor,' I have a problem with when those things are not given the proper contextual hue.
Billy Corgan
#43. I'll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can't underestimate band chemistry.
Billy Corgan
#44. I do not trust those who make the vaccines, or the apparatus behind it all to push it on us through fear.
Billy Corgan
#45. I think long and hard about what it is I'm actually trying to do, and then I kind of have to narrow my focus into that. If I don't, I'm too all over the place.
Billy Corgan
#46. I walked away from going to church when I was 8. I didn't set foot in another church until I was 28.
Billy Corgan
#47. When you actually like each other, it translates to the music.
Billy Corgan
#48. To re-embrace what I once loved about music has been a warming process for me, because it's a good, earned feeling now.
Billy Corgan
#49. The closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets.
Billy Corgan
#51. 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.
Billy Corgan
#52. 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.
Billy Corgan
#53. The title of a song is like the wrapping on a present.
Billy Corgan
#54. 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.
Billy Corgan
#55. I think God is the most unexplored territory in rock and roll music.
Billy Corgan
#56. 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.
Billy Corgan
#57. If practice makes perfect, and no one's perfect, then why practice?
Billy Corgan
#58. Why is it that all non-conformists look the same?
Billy Corgan
#59. We need to get back to a level of social responsibility that we haven't seen for a long time.
Billy Corgan
#60. 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.
Billy Corgan
#61. I've seen foreigners really shift on their view of America, and that's hard for me to take.
Billy Corgan
#62. Most great records really start with the drums.
Billy Corgan
#63. I'm prepared to spend the rest of my life playing clubs, if that means I'm playing music that I believe in.
Billy Corgan
#64. I never seemed to fit in. But it made me try to strive for things ten times harder.
Billy Corgan
#65. 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.
Billy Corgan
#66. I always thought Kurt Cobain was the perfect embodiment of the great alternative guitar player.
Billy Corgan
#67. Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the color red and red reminds you of the color your not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song 'Cow.'
Billy Corgan
#68. Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years?
Billy Corgan
#69. If you've sold over a million records, you are not punk rock, you are milking the system for everything that it's worth.
Billy Corgan
#70. It seems to me that references to bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin meant more to me a year ago and all those old things are totally losing importance.
Billy Corgan
#71. 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.
Billy Corgan
#72. I hate how in magazine pictures, they always stick me somewhere in the back. It means they don't think I'm the cute one.
Billy Corgan
#73. Sometimes people just like being around each other, and good things come out of that.
Billy Corgan
#74. I'm Irish and I was born on St. Patrick's day. I'm lucky sevens.
Billy Corgan
#75. 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.
Billy Corgan
#76. I do not think wrestling is going to save the world.
Billy Corgan
#77. 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.
Billy Corgan
#78. Being in a rock band is just an excuse not to get a job
Billy Corgan
#79. I'm by nature kind of a glum person, but I'm not a sad pathetic
Billy Corgan
#81. 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.
Billy Corgan
#82. 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.
Billy Corgan
#84. In the music business I am surrounded by people who don't view music as a sacred voice. They view music as something that they can use and exploit, often times lazily. They have no sense of the tradition, they have no sense of honor about those who came before and charted the path.
Billy Corgan
#85. Somewhere between the intellectual idea of why we're attracted to certain things and the pragmatic reality is some form of ever-evolving truth.
Billy Corgan
#86. There's a lot of days where you feel forgotten.
Billy Corgan
#87. I've rarely done anything that's overtly self-destructive without consciously knowing what I'm doing. And then of course, the astute journalist jumps forward and says, "Why are you being calculated?" Calculated seems to assume a sinister intent. My intent is always for artistic effect.
Billy Corgan
#88. I was trying to be this person who is cool, eternally rocking.
Billy Corgan
#89. 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.
Billy Corgan
#90. I'm viewed as this weird, crippled character. But you got to take your lumps.
Billy Corgan
#91. 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.
Billy Corgan
#92. In a weird kind of way, music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.
Billy Corgan
#93. If the next record is no better than Gish, then we've failed.
Billy Corgan
#94. I'm like the Fugitive, running from the one-armed indie-rock community!
Billy Corgan
#96. I'm not going to die glamorously. I'll probably be eating a Twinkie, take a bite, and fall over.
Billy Corgan
#97. I have a saying, which is, 'Crazy is good for business.' I think rock and roll really is about being a bit crazy.
Billy Corgan
#98. 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.
Billy Corgan
#99. 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.
Billy Corgan
#100. 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.
Billy Corgan
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