Billy Corgan Quotes

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.'

The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. It was going to either be a big band, or a no band.

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

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.

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.

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 and said, 'Welcome to the deep waters, kid.' I'll never forget that.

...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 sitting there with a beer and a .45 in his belt, Manson is just speaking to that end of society. He's speaking as an artist. He's not speaking as himself, and that's where people get really lost with Manson.

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 and it would be me and my 'disciples' or my 'acolytes.' The word acolyte - that's like fuck you. These are my friends, but because they're not Billy Corgan or Helena Christensen, they become my 'posse' or my 'followers,' and it's like, fuck you for insulting my friends like that. That's so fucking incredible to me.

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 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.

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.

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

People act like Nirvana invented grunge; they just took it and personified it.

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 ourselves with who we really are. Life, experiences, traumas -- whatever -- they all add up to make you some altered version of what you are. So there's this battle that goes on between what you are and what you become, and it's been very important for me to unravel what I was taught to be or what I became. and to draw a direct parallel to music -- the closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets, because I think what talent I do have is connected to that person, it's not a manipulative process, it's intuitive. You can learn about chords and guitars, but there's a piece of you that makes it individual, and it's been a slow process for me to become whatever it is that I'm supposed to be.

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.