Billie Joe Armstrong Quotes

I never wanted to be part of any scene, I never wanted to be a part of anything, I wanted to do my own thing. Those are the lessons I learned from punk rock.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.

That's what drew me to rock music in the first place - that sense of remaking the world on your own terms.

To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am'.

People relate to the spirit of the band, which is to live your way and succeed on your own terms. There's no hypocrisy in being successful and still railing against conformity.

'Punk' doesn't mean Mohawks and safety pins. It's about not conforming.

Now I'm old... maybe I'm still an eccentric hippie. There's a wonderful freedom in the eccentricity - you can go places, you can be wacky, and you don't have to be constrained. I think that's why people are eccentric - eccentricity is a weapon... and it's great!

I was always a rebel in the sense that I always wanted to go my own road and do something that nobody else has done.

If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there's a million ways to be, you know that there are.

Unless you hit your television with a sledgehammer, you're not going to be able to be an individual.

I like being unconventional.

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

There's a hell of a lot of freedom in this rock and roll circus... it's where all the freaks go - it's the environment for me.

I'd rather dance in a corner than dance in a circle.

Punk rock is very rebellious, of course, but it also means thinking for yourself.

Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster's terms, 'nirvana' means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

The punk era, at its best, celebrated questioning the norm and the promotion of originality. Both concepts have always resonated with me.

I am very into making up my own rules.

We went and made our own scene and did our own thing.

Punk is all about doing what you want and being yourself. And that's what rap is too.

It's like our little thing: you can take the girl out of the punk, but you can't take the punk out of the girl.

I kind of go to the beat of my own drum.

Metallica lives in a little bubble. We just do our own thing. We're not part of any trends or waves or fads. We can just do our own thing, all the time. It's a great luxury. I don't think we were really appreciative of it until recently, and really understood that it is what keeps us alive. It's great to be able to have the freedom to run around and do all this crazy stuff, and at all cost, avoid making another record, just to piss our managers off.

I refuse to act the way someone expects me to.

I love the freedom to do whatever I want with style and not be put into a box.