Quotes by Billy Corgan

“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.”

“I'm Irish and I was born on St. Patrick's Day. I'm lucky sevens.”

“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.”

“We're like a really nice drink. We help people get through the day--we make life a little sunnier. I don't think we have any profound effect. If anybody has had a profound effect, it's The Beatles,...”

“My mother came to a Smashing Pumpkins gig once, and I was wearing a dress. She was very upset. She said, 'Everyone's gonna think you're a fag.' I said,'Well, they already think I'm an asshole.'”

“Actually, I was having dinner with Michael (Stipe, of R.E.M.) when our second album went platinum, which up until that point was the highest success we'd ever had. And he turned to me during dinner...”

“One of the other reasons that we quit having journalists come here is because they would kind of hang out for several days, and they'd see me around at the clubs, and the story would get written an...”

“This is not a reaction against a negative world. It's a response to a negative world.”

“I don't necessarily believe that the sting of failure is a bad thing. It gives you a certain amount of freedom to just say fuck it!”

“...What people miss about (Marilyn) Manson is that he is just reflecting, he's an artist, people want to focus that energy on him, but it's not really him, it's really about you. So for every guy s...”

“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.”

“For a 6-foot-3 guy with no hair and a whiny voice, I've done all right.”

“Life is everything and nothing all at once.”

“I’m trying to figure out how to take the instrument and have it still sound like a guitar, but put you in a different universe.”

“‘What happened when alternative music came out was authentic. It was a reflection of what was happening at the time and it had to do with authenticity. This is the reflection of the authenticity no...”

“The simplest way that I can understand therapy is that we're born a certain way, we're taught to be something different, and we spend our whole lives trying to unravel it and ultimately align ourse...”

“I think the original, 'They're the next Jane's Addiction' things that people said about us in the beginning have been pretty much wiped out.”

“I have a hard time thinking of men trying to sing my songs, because I think my perspective is very much feminine... For me the idea of having a feminine perspective is a willingness to be vulnerabl...”

“The closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets.”

“When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before.”