Top 200 Billy Corgan Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I’m passionate about creating new systems that are more holistic to humankind. What do I mean by that? I mean, create new systems of business so that people with ethics both exploit their goods and their gifts while not exploiting the earth, exploiting one another.”

— Billy Corgan

202. “I’ve always believed that we could reach past genre – we didn’t ride the grunge coat-tails; we’ve always been on our terms.”

— Billy Corgan

203. “Everybody likes to run around on their phones, including me, but we don’t always want to hear who’s sweating somewhere in some non-air-conditioned factory to create those things so that they can keep the prices down.”

— Billy Corgan

204. “I’ve seen foreigners really shift on their view of America, and that’s hard for me to take.”

— Billy Corgan

205. “I’m like the Fugitive, running from the one-armed indie-rock community!”

— Billy Corgan

206. “In the music business I am surrounded by people who don’t view music as a sacred voice. They view music as something that they can use and exploit, often times lazily. They have no sense of the tradition, they have no sense of honor about those who came before and charted the path.”

— Billy Corgan

207. “Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years?”

— Billy Corgan

208. “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

209. “People always seemed to pay attention to us. I have no idea why – there was just a presence between the four people or something.”

— Billy Corgan

210. “My view of the world is always tempered by the fact that there are people who are less fortunate than I am.”

— Billy Corgan

211. “Personally, I think Jesus would like better bands.”

— Billy Corgan

212. “I’ve become a guy who’s like a complaining, whining neurotic.”

— Billy Corgan

213. “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

214. “I think when I listen to old records, it puts me back in the atmosphere of what it felt like to make the record and who was there and what the room looked like. It’s more a sensory memory.”

— Billy Corgan

215. “Well, we have brought certain things upon ourselves. I’ve certainly brought things upon us with my mouth.”

— Billy Corgan

216. “There’s nothing wrong with technology. It’s when technology is the story and not the artist, that’s the problem.”

— Billy Corgan

217. “We are the most beloved and hated band in the world.”

— Billy Corgan

218. “I walked away from going to church when I was 8. I didn’t set foot in another church until I was 28.”

— Billy Corgan

219. “I’m an experimental artist in a field that doesn’t celebrate experimentation. It celebrates self-destruction, which I guess you could say is a creative endeavor.”

— Billy Corgan

220. “I’d reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.”

— Billy Corgan

221. “I never wanted to leave the Smashing Pumpkins. That was never the plan.”

— Billy Corgan

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Billy Corgan

225. “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

226. “It’s what the mainstream does – they absorb things and they blunt the power of it. And so the next generation and the next generation has to become more shocking and more provocative in order to get any rise out of anybody.”

— Billy Corgan

227. “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

228. “Rock in the mainstream culture has lost a lot of its mojo.”

— Billy Corgan

229. “It makes me crazy to think that somebody might attack my city or any other city.”

— Billy Corgan

230. “Stay in school. Lie to your teachers, but stay in school.”

— Billy Corgan

231. “To be able to put your arms around 24 years of music, it’s really fun.”

— Billy Corgan

232. “I did 13-something years of talking to wrestlers and promoters about why they did certain things and why they booked matches a certain way and what they were thinking and whether they were satisfied with the draw. And I got a lot of insight in the business.”

— Billy Corgan

233. “I want to make great songs.”

— Billy Corgan

234. “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.”

— Billy Corgan