Billy Corgan Quotes

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

It's a very hard thing for all of us to accept ourselves at all the different stages - the horrible side, the wonderful side, the adorable side - and who you are as a grownup. And then to bring what you learned as a child to that grownup: that is the magic of creativity.

Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you'd rather not know the answers to.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction - they're always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song.

I don't feel I have to be Jackson Browne. Still, I like to say something.

When it comes down to the song writing, I'm just very slow - very slow. Because the songs are about my life, so I'm doing emotional work on myself.

You can't escape from yourself, can you?

I think 'Lost Boy' is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don't picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.

To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

Until we have met the monsters in ourselves, we keep trying to slay them in the outer world. And we find that we cannot. For all darkness in the world stems from darkness in the heart. And it is there that we must do our work.

Last time I really got to know myself it turned out there was a whole gang of bitches in there to deal with. I felt like the receptionist at a rehab center. They all had nice tits though, I gotta say.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

Emotionally, it was the hardest 33 days of my life, but it was worth it because the result is that this album is 100 percent me. It’s heartfelt, real, bold, honest, vulnerable, hopeful, strong, poetic, bluesy, gritty, pretty, and simple.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

At least I'm not playing other people for a change. It's a very odd place to be... I feel I'm an actress who sings a bit.

It's part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can't face. It's the thing that, if we don't deal with it, eventually poisons our lives.

The Artist's Way is a spiritual journey, a pilrimage home to the self.

I feel like you can't really be truthful as an artist and empathize with the human experience, unless you know your truth and you're not living a lie. So I'm learning through it, and it's making me a better person, and it's making me a better artist, I think.

Something in me knows where I’m going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.