I want to make great songs. — Billy Corgan

It’s a simple formula for me now, I don’t play any song I don’t want to play. — Billy Corgan

The title of a song is like the wrapping on a present. — Billy Corgan

People try to make a big deal, like I don’t want to play my old songs. That’s not it. I don’t want to play my old songs if that’s my only option. That’s a different thing. — Billy Corgan

You give me a @#$%& kazoo and I’ll write you a good song. — Billy Corgan

I don’t think people are fans of me because I wrote hit songs. I think they’re fans because I’m a lunatic or a weirdo. The hit songs came out of my idiosyncratic personality, not the other way around. — Billy Corgan

Say you write a song about a chandelier, and the chandelier gives off light. And the light is the color red and red reminds you of the color your not supposed to wear around a bull. So you name the song ‘Cow.’ — Billy Corgan

Once a pumpkin, Always a pumpkin. — Billy Corgan

I never wanted to leave the Smashing Pumpkins. That was never the plan. — Billy Corgan

You will never see the four original Pumpkins on stage ever again, unless it’s a Hall of Fame thing. But you would never see a tour. There’s so much damage, there’s no way. — Billy Corgan

Smashing Pumpkins has never been a band about hit songs. — 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. — Billy Corgan

My view of the world is always tempered by the fact that there are people who are less fortunate than I am. — Billy Corgan

I do not think wrestling is going to save the world. — Billy Corgan

And the world so hard to understand is the world you can’t live without. — Billy Corgan

Do I belong in the conversation about the best artists in the world? My answer is yes, I do. — Billy Corgan

This is not a reaction against a negative world. It’s a response to a negative world. — Billy Corgan

Indie world won’t have me, and mainstream world treats me like an alien, but here I am still floating between these two worlds. — Billy Corgan

A missive to all you metal bands, the world is totally over the rock thing. Rock is deader than it’s ever been. — Billy Corgan

More than any audience in the world, Americans will cross their arms, stare at you and say, ‘OK, whaddya got?’–no matter how many times you’ve proven it to them. — Billy Corgan

My pat line about the Cubs and payroll is that the amount of merchandise the Cubs would sell off a world series championship would more than cover for a big payroll. — Billy Corgan

I was part of a generation that changed the world–and it was taken over by poseurs. — Billy Corgan

I like my home and I like the nature. — Billy Corgan

Life is everything and nothing all at once. — Billy Corgan

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. — Billy Corgan

The deeper I get into my life as a musician, I’m discovering that it becomes less and less about other people, and more about what I want to do. And that’s a good place to be. — Billy Corgan

We don’t make music for people to take drugs to, we make music for people to live their life. — Billy Corgan

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

In my particular instance, I came from a family that didn’t have anything. Everything I earned in life I made. Myself. With songs that I wrote. — Billy Corgan

Everything about life makes me lonely. — Billy Corgan

If you don’t have some sort of belief system by which to center your life, it’s hard sometimes to understand why you would put up with your family. — Billy Corgan

I reached a point in my life where I felt like I was living through some old character. — Billy Corgan

Rock & roll is not about what you play, it’s about how you play it. — Billy Corgan

Well, all rock and roll is based in artifice. — Billy Corgan

Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years? — Billy Corgan

That’s the great thing about rock n’ roll: the myth is ultimately more important than the reality. And that’s what you learn–you just learn to go with the mythology. — Billy Corgan

I think rock & roll has prepared me for a lot of flexibility. — Billy Corgan

I think God is the most unexplored territory in rock and roll music. — Billy Corgan

I have a saying, which is, ‘Crazy is good for business.’ I think rock and roll really is about being a bit crazy. — Billy Corgan

Rock and Roll is still asking people like me to live up to the old guard’s concept of what success is but it doesn’t mean anything. — Billy Corgan

Personally, I think Jesus would like better bands. — Billy Corgan

If there was a simple ethic for the band, it was that we want to be able to do whatever we want to do. — Billy Corgan

We are the most beloved and hated band in the world. — Billy Corgan

I dont think we’re the type of band people look at and say, ‘I want to grow up to be just like that’. We’re like a train wreck. — Billy Corgan

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

You can only be this high–powered mojo rock band for so long, then you just can’t look people in the eye. So, we’ve projected our own demise. — Billy Corgan

The reason I don’t play any of the old songs is because I really honor my old band, and I think that those songs are best served within the context of that band. — Billy Corgan

Ultimately, running a band is about the relationships you have with people. — Billy Corgan

It seems to me that references to bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin meant more to me a year ago and all those old things are totally losing importance. — Billy Corgan

We weren’t like mates who decided to form a band. The other three met me because they were interested in being in the band that I was starting. — Billy Corgan

I met Scott Stapp when the band was first coming up, great guy. I haven’t seen him for years, but a great guy. — Billy Corgan

I’ll come in with a string of riffs and direct the musical ideas. But you still need a band and their input to make the ideas come alive. You can’t underestimate band chemistry. — Billy Corgan

We’re the worst band in America… That makes us the best. — Billy Corgan

Around the mid–’90s every hair guy who would have been in a hair–metal band got his tattoos and suddenly decided he was alternative. It just became like a thing. — Billy Corgan

I’m definitely responsible for coming in with some basic chord changes, or ideas. Everybody in the band looks to me to come up with the basic seed, so it’s not very productive to come in with nothing. — Billy Corgan

I’ve been too productive for too long, and despite what anybody wants to strip away from me, I am influential. I am. — Billy Corgan

Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock. — Billy Corgan

Hey, Christian rock, if you want to be good, stop copying U2. U2 already did it. You know what I mean? There’s a lot of U2–esque Christian rock. — Billy Corgan

Rock in the mainstream culture has lost a lot of its mojo. — Billy Corgan

Well, I’m known as a guitar–rock guy, you know? You’re not supposed to play with synthesizers. This is not in the rulebook. — Billy Corgan

I’m like the Fugitive, running from the one–armed indie–rock community! — Billy Corgan

If you’ve sold over a million records, you are not punk rock, you are milking the system for everything that it’s worth. — Billy Corgan

When alternative music–which is supposed to be the standard–bearer of where white rock is headed–becomes either too cute or too manufactured, that’s just really not good. — Billy Corgan

Heavy metal is a universal energy––it’s the sound of a volcano. It’s rock, it’s earth shattering. Somewhere in our primal being we understand. — Billy Corgan

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. — Billy Corgan

In my Corgan brain, I’ve decided it’s almost as simple as ‘All you need is love.’ Almost. — Billy Corgan

We love cats more than we love women [with Marilyn Manson]. — Billy Corgan

Destruction is a true sign of devotion. As I always tell my girlfriend when she threatens to kill me. ‘You should kill me and it would tell me that you love me. — Billy Corgan

I grew up in a house of no love or emotion–it kind of sticks with you. — Billy Corgan

Like any good tree that one would hope to grow, we must set our roots deep into the ground so that what is real will prosper in the Light of Love. — Billy Corgan

The music is all we care about––so if that’s bad, then we’re bad. — Billy Corgan

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

Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre. — Billy Corgan

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

To be able to put your arms around 24 years of music, it’s really fun. — Billy Corgan

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. — Billy Corgan

People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that’s gonna be unpopular. — Billy Corgan

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

The music business–and I guess you could say any artistic endeavor–usually rewards those who are on the leading edge of where everything is going, but you can’t be too far. — Billy Corgan

You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience. — Billy Corgan

The point is to let the music be itself. If it doesn’t mean anything to you, then it’s bullsh*t. — Billy Corgan

I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity. — Billy Corgan

Music is supposed to be interwoven into the fabric of society; it is not supposed to be a plaything that is there to serve the population’s titillation of the moment. — Billy Corgan

To re–embrace what I once loved about music has been a warming process for me, because it’s a good, earned feeling now. — Billy Corgan

I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life playing clubs, if that means I’m playing music that I believe in. — Billy Corgan

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

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. — Billy Corgan