When you actually like each other, it translates to the music.
— 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.
I don't wanna play this kind of cartoon character anymore.
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.
Ultimately, running a band is about the relationships you have with people.
I'd reached a point where there was a direct conflict between what I was trying to be and who I really was.
I mean my point as an artist is I'm on my own little weird journey across the sky here and whether or not anybody's listening, or listening to the degree I would like them to, at the end of the day has to be an inconsequential thing because I can't chase this culture.
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.
I grew up in the suburbs and basically associate the suburbs with cultural death.
I think rock & roll has prepared me for a lot of flexibility.
I'm a bit weird.
I don't want to be 25 again.
I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.
These days you're not just competing with the tedium, you're competing with the cellphone.
You just reach a point sometimes with somebody where it just doesn't work.
People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular.
My mother and I parting company at four years old is a recurring theme; although it's not symbolically necessarily present, it's present in all my relationships.
To re-embrace what I once loved about music has been a warming process for me, because it's a good, earned feeling now.
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.
I think a spiritual journey is not so much a journey of discovery. It's a journey of recovery. It's a journey of uncovering your own inner nature. It's already there.
I think long and hard about what it is I'm actually trying to do, and then I kind of have to narrow my focus into that. If I don't, I'm too all over the place.
I'm a really honest person.
In a weird kind of way, music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.
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.
I often have deer on my property and there's a fox and owls. You're not going to see that in the city.
I like my home and I like the nature.
I mean, I'm certainly not a 'teaophyte,' or whatever the word would be.
Music is your guide.
Radiohead and Our Lady Peace are doing the seven layers of guitar, and I kind of jumped on that before anyone else did.
I'm from a lower middle class background; all my family were immigrants.
You have to keep adapting to the times. If you kind of go with it, it can kind of fun.
I think the days of working with producers in the conventional sense are over for me.
The things I'm guided to do are really strange to me.
To be able to put your arms around 24 years of music, it's really fun.
A good artist is willing to die many times over. What's funny is, I've died so many times.
Compliments and criticism are all ultimately based on some form of projection.
I want people to see me happy.
Most of my arguments with musicians through the years have had more to do with their attitude about music, or their attitude about their own lives, or their personal responsibility. Music has never really been the big centerpiece of the fight.
I was trying to be this person who is cool, eternally rocking.
All I can go on is my own value system.
Where is this great love for rock and roll that existed for 50 or 60 years?
Wrestling is one of the last truly rebellious American things left.
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.
I'm a green-tea guy.
There are people out there who are older who are cool. I want that.
I'm not interested in pop art.
You know Americans are obsessed with life and death and rebirth, that's the American Cycle. You know, awakening, tragic, horrible death and then Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's the American story, again and again.
You have to be willing to deal with the ups and downs of the music, the ups and downs of the audience.
One thing I've learned to appreciate as I've gotten a little older is direct forms of communication.
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.
