Quotes from Billy Corgan

"I was a well-behaved nightmare"

"Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock."

"I'll die someday, and it won't be mythical or glamorous; I'll just bite into a twinkie and fall over"

"...Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. The light is the color red, and red reminds you of the color you're not supposed to wear around a bull...So you name the song 'Cow'" -explaining how he came up with the name "Rhinoceros"

"Don't judge yourself by someone else's standards. You will always lose"

"We're not getting any prettier."

"I never seemed to fit in... but it made me try to strive for things ten times harder."

"All I ever wanted was everything, and all I got was sh*t."

"What goes on between a person and himself and the universe is their own damned business. There's no way we could ever cheapen it."

"I'm looking forward to some kind of well-coordinated Floyd future, perhaps even a floating pig of our own"

"The world is not set up for a band like the Smashing Pumpkins. It's set up for the bands who can play the angle better."

"Have you ever seen my teeth? Have you ever really seen my teeth?"

"Stay in school. Lie to your teachers, but stay in school."

"I think it's probably because we didn't dumb things like, 'Wave your hands in the air' that we suffered a little, but I would rather suffer and not be a fool."

"My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that i wasn't like other children"

"I reached a point in my life where I felt that I was like living through some old character"

"In honor of Thanksgiving, we will play Ode...to...the...Turkey! Just remember though, when you are eating that turkey: he was once a free, happy turkey, and soon the turkey will be in your belly."

"I don't believe in God. I don't believe in America. I don't believe in rock'n'roll... I believe in myself"

"I've been known to play the saw, but only when tipsy"

"You give me a f*cking kazoo, and I'll write you a good song

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

"I'm like the Fugitive, running from the one-armed indie-rock community!"

"I almost feel that we're more powerful being acoustic than we are electric."

"My myth was rock-goddom. I saw that as a means to become one who has no pain."

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

"I'm about to take the stupid shirt off... but the band won't let me."

"I get more out of life just being myself, by just being a human being."

"You're in Pumpkin World, buddy. Where nothing is as it seems."

"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"

"I said rat in a cage, not monkey from a f*cking wire."

"All we need is creativity."

"Well, I didn't make the team, so rock 'n roll was the next thing"

"I'm glad that I'm such a good rhymer
Better than being a social climber
Just because I'm a bit brighter
Than some f*cking writer." -fax sent to a reporter who gave SP a bad review

"Everyone has a misguided perception of my brain."

"We don't make music for people to take drugs to. We make music for people to live their life."

"Starting out, I'd consider this astonishing legacy of music, and being held to this great flame, I'd wonder; How do you do something better or new? Or, how do you not be so specific that you just appeal to five people?"

"I've always been way too sensible for my own good."

"At this point in time I actually don't know who I am."

"For a 6-foot-3 guy with a whiny voice, I've done all right."

"I'm a martyr. It's part of my insanity."

"Shave your head, wear a 'ZERO' shirt. Take away your identity. What do you have? You still have yourself."

"Are you all ready to have a rockin' mashed potato time?"

"Some people want to express that apathy with noise and brutality... It's the want to transcend all that, to find some deeper essence in life, that drives me."

"I don't know if God would agree with me, but believing in God is kind of unimportant when compared to believing in yourself, because if you go with the idea that God gave you a mind, and the ability to judge things, then he would want you to believe in yourself and not worry about believing in Him."

"Would I be in these silver pants?!??"

"Just recording with James is a sexual experience. The way he presses 'record'... you gotta see it."

"I just started dreaming this elaborate dream."

"I hope we mature gracefully, but right now I don't really care because thinking about the future and thinking about the past is really just a way of avoiding the present."

"The weird nihilism that permeates Mellon Collie is extremely relevant to what's going on right now. So many kids are intelligent and articulate, but they don't know what to do with themselves."

"I wish from day one, people could would have looked at me and said, 'You're all right, come on, join the team,' but it's never been that way with me... I don't know why."

"I've become the guy who's like a complaining whining neurotic."

"I no longer feel the need to torch my soul in public"

"If there is a heaven, i see me getting there and getting yelled at, 'You said this naughty word nine million times!', and it's like, 'Noooo!!!' but, 'Yes you did.'"

"We certainly feel we have a different affinity with people who like our band because they can definitely understand where we're coming from."

"My inspiration has been to translate what I see in total. People often ask me why I write sad songs, but life is sad and life is happy. So, it seems to me that I should write happy songs and sad songs."

"My view of the world if always tempered by the fact that there are people who are less fortunate than I am."

"Everything about life makes me lonely."

"Sometimes you have to go backward in order to move ahead."

"Physically, we overpower anybody as a band"

"Every pillar that's set up is meant to be knocked over. All you have to be afraid of is what people are gonna think."

"If I had spent fourteen months in a small room with Jesus, I'd want to fist fight with him"

"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."

"I just can't stand to see Sesame Street characters disgraced. I of course was molested by Big Bird himself. When I saw that flying at me it brought back a lot of painful memories. I won't even tell you what he did... but he does have that long beak..."

"There's a freedom that you can attain by having a career like this where you have money... but you lose something equally as valuable as sitting in the backyard playing with the dog."

"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."

"I feel like my time on this earth is severly limited, and I'm going to exploit it for all it's worth"

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

"Certainly the media saturation is way worse. Now you turn on the T.V. and there's fashion and culture and news aimed directly at 16-year olds. I've met kids who get laid at 10, 12. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 18. Kids are acting grown-up, but they're not grown up inside."

"I know what it's like to be fifteen years old and live in white suburban America."

"I hate how in magazine pictures they always stick me somewhere in the back. It means they don't think I am the cute one."

"When I watch a puppet show, I'm not watching the puppets...I'm trying to see who's pulling the strings."

"I was a jock, but I wasn't on the sports team. I played guitar, but I didn't hang out with the stoners. I just couldn't hang in any way, and when you're young and you can't hang, you oppose. So I was anti-everything, f*ck you all."

"We've always done better with readers than with critics. Usually that means you've at least got people's hearts."

"I have a hard time thinking of men trying to sing my songs, because I think my perspective is definitely feminine"

"My hair was always too long or too short, my clothes were always too funny or not funny enough. It's been that way throughout my life"

"I'm not the kind of person who can close my eyes and pretend like it's still '93."

"I've always been the type of person that people either hated or liked." "Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre."

"Why do I need 1,000 people validating my existence?"

"A friend of mine asked me 'Do you really mean it when you sing '"God is empty just like me"?', and 363 days out of the year, the answer is no. But those two days I feel it, I feel it pretty intensely."