Quotes from Billy Corgan

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

Rock & roll is not about what you play, it's about how you play it.

I have a saying, which is, 'Crazy is good for business.' I think rock and roll really is about being a bit crazy.

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.

Well, all rock and roll is based in artifice.

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

What most people do is try to find a comfortable persona that they're in alignment with and the public likes and appreciates them for.

I walked away from going to church when I was 8. I didn't set foot in another church until I was 28.

My father was a guitar player, and I was raised with a super high standard of what good guitar playing was.

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.

It's important for people to talk and get beyond the wall of Facebook and social media.

I don't wanna play this kind of cartoon character anymore.

In our lives in a lot of ways it's all about fake. You've got people wanting things for fake reasons.

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

I was brought up Roman Catholic. I'm not even baptized.

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.

My step-mom would tell me that she would get complaints from adults that I stared too much at them.

I didn't grow up with my mother, and so losing her for real was like, some sort of latent childhood, some sort of unresolved issue. When she left for real, it was sort of like, I was done.

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.

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.

Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.

To me, music was about being accepted and escaping from this crummy existence.

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

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