Quotes from Billie Joe Armstrong

With my family, my sons both love music and play music, and they're really good at it.

I just want to write good songs that people love, which is a tough thing to do.

I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.

Punk is not just the sound, the music. Punk is a lifestyle.

Punk has always been about doing things your own way. What it represents for me is ultimate freedom and a sense of individuality.

School is practice for future life, practice makes perfect and nobody's perfect, so why practice?

I don't want to limit myself musically. It would be really limiting if we'd neglect something we really want to do, like explore other styles of music.

What annoys the hell out of me is the arrogance of some people. They don't even listen to our music, they decided in advance that they don't like it.

There are a lot of bands who claim to be punk and they only play the music, they have no clue what it's all about. It's a lifestyle. It's not about popularity and all that crap.

I'm a father. It isn't just my life any more. I don't want my kid finding bottles in the house or seeing his father completely smashed.

Music - that's been my education. There's not a day that goes by that I take it for granted.

For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on 'Madden'.

The first time that you escape from home or the small town that you live in - there's a reason a small town is called a small town: It's because not many people want to live there.

And you don't want to always write about politics just for the sake of writing about politics.

There's an honesty in our family - my kids and I are able to talk about things without me putting the fear of God into them.

Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.

Our passion is our strength.

I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.

In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.

The things that people do now in sports, you can't even believe. These are complete total athletes. To see what human beings can do in the highest level is amazing.

A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.

Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.

When I signed that major-label contract when I was 20 years old. I did it because I wanted to play music for the rest of my life. That's every 20-year-old's dream - to do whatever the hell you want.

I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.