Top 200 Billy Corgan Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “We can look you in the eye and talk to you about life, heart, love rock’n’roll, whatever, but we do not have the moral authority to tell people how to vote or what to do with their bodies. We are just a rock band.”

— Billy Corgan

153. “I was trying to be this person who is cool, eternally rocking.”

— Billy Corgan

154. “We have a problem with any labels that people try to hang on us, because all it does is drag you down.”

— Billy Corgan

155. “I want people to see me happy.”

— Billy Corgan

156. “I mean, I’m certainly not a ‘teaophyte,’ or whatever the word would be.”

— Billy Corgan

157. “It’s a simple formula for me now, I don’t play any song I don’t want to play.”

— Billy Corgan

158. “You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience.”

— Billy Corgan

159. “The music is all we care about – so if that’s bad, then we’re bad.”

— Billy Corgan

160. “I grew up in the suburbs and basically associate the suburbs with cultural death.”

— Billy Corgan

161. “I don’t wanna play this kind of cartoon character anymore.”

— Billy Corgan

162. “There are people out there who are older who are cool. I want that.”

— Billy Corgan

163. “If you don’t fit into this kind of like gossipy, trendy, Web-hit thingy, you’re relegated to sort of second-class celebrity status.”

— Billy Corgan

164. “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

165. “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

166. “I think humankind is going to have to evolve into systems that are more transparent. Then people will be able to make more integral choices about the food they eat.”

— Billy Corgan

167. “I don’t have any sentimental notion about how people are going to remember me.”

— Billy Corgan

168. “Injuries are nothing to be ashamed about.”

— Billy Corgan

169. “I really think it’s a white, bourgeois idea to pretend that you don’t have influences. It seems to be the obsession strictly of white people in college.”

— Billy Corgan

170. “I work differently than most people.”

— Billy Corgan

171. “We’ve turned into a whining society.”

— Billy Corgan

172. “To me, music was about being accepted and escaping from this crummy existence.”

— Billy Corgan

173. “I don’t think I’m before my time, I just don’t think I’m in my time.”

— Billy Corgan

174. “If I had spent fourteen months in a small room with Jesus, I’d want to fist fight with him.”

— Billy Corgan

175. “We need to get back to a level of social responsibility that we haven’t seen for a long time.”

— Billy Corgan

176. “Everybody I’m working with now is a friend. And I would be very, very remiss to work with anybody in the future who has not shown me who they really are.”

— Billy Corgan

177. “When you present people with things from the heart and from the soul, they make better choices: They make better choices about their bodies, they make better choices about their partners, they make better choices about the environment.”

— Billy Corgan

178. “The funny thing about me that most people never really understand is that, at heart, I’m really a jock.”

— Billy Corgan

179. “These days you’re not just competing with the tedium, you’re competing with the cellphone.”

— Billy Corgan

180. “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

181. “That’s the real endeavor: to try to create that direct conduit from the pure consciousness of your creative voice to the person who’s a craftsman who can go into the world and consistently deliver new things worth paying attention to.”

— Billy Corgan

182. “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

183. “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

184. “Ultimately, running a band is about the relationships you have with people.”

— Billy Corgan

185. “Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.”

— Billy Corgan

186. “Sometimes people just like being around each other, and good things come out of that.”

— Billy Corgan

187. “Well, all rock and roll is based in artifice.”

— Billy Corgan

188. “That was a terrible Super Bowl, I have to say. I mean you got the big Peyton Manning walk off into the sunset win, but what a shnoozo.”

— Billy Corgan

189. “If the next record is no better than Gish, then we’ve failed.”

— Billy Corgan

190. “People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that’s gonna be unpopular.”

— Billy Corgan

191. “I put up with the music business because I understand that I’m in the tradition, I’m in a tradition that’s of far greater importance than the business I seem to be in. Everywhere I go in the world, people ask me about the business that I seem to be in, but I’m not really in that business.”

— Billy Corgan

192. “I’ve had a lot of things rendered as not being effective or as some indication of my lack of sanity, only to be praised ten, fifteen, twenty years later for what I did once in this overt consciousness.”

— Billy Corgan

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

— Billy Corgan

194. “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

195. “I think the days of working with producers in the conventional sense are over for me.”

— Billy Corgan

196. “The desire to hit a big home run is dominating the music business.”

— Billy Corgan

197. “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

198. “Every year that goes by, I lose that much more motivation to play rock.”

— Billy Corgan

199. “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

200. “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