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

I believe that if the Tribune company ever tries to close down Wrigley Field that you will have a protest from every corner of the globe.

If practice makes perfect, and no one's perfect, then why practice?

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 never wanted to leave the Smashing Pumpkins. That was never the plan.

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.

Great music completely obliterates any conceptions of genre.

I was part of a generation that changed the world - and it was taken over by poseurs.

Saturn Return is just the return of your planets to their original position.

Compliments and criticism are all ultimately based on some form of projection.

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

Your beliefs are decisions

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

To be a saint or a man of too good a nature in today's pragmatic world, with everyone out to get the other fellow, was equivalent to being a fool, wasn't it?

In meeting again after a separation acquaintances ask after our outward life friends after our inner life.

I used to rap as a kid and people were impressed by it, so it gave me the drive to keep going. Everybody has at least one talent. I guess this is my talent.

We should not be borrowing money from the Chinese to bail out the Greeks. What's coming next? Intergalactic bailouts?

You are keeping the possibility [of peace] open. No wise leader would do anything less

I have fancied myself a rebel, but at every critical moment of my life, I have been exactly the child my parents raised.

Compelling spectacles are not to reach a niche market, it could be for reaching a niche marketing but on a grand scale. This is for grand marketing.

The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.