Quotes By Billie Joe Armstrong

I love storytelling.

Punk is not just the sound, the music. Punk is a lifestyle.

In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing that I find is feeling lost and trying to find your way.

I think it's your own choice if you turn from an angry young man to a bitter, old bastard.

My brother David was a great athlete and I knew there was no way I could live up to that.

School is practice for the future, and practice makes perfect. But nobody's perfect, so why practice?

Minority is about being an individual. It's like you have to sift through the darkness to find your place and be that individual you want to be your entire life.

I sort of enjoy the fact that I'm misunderstood most of the time. That's fine.

Music - that's been my education. There's not a day that goes by that I take it for granted.

If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.

No one's really happy anyway, it's not human.

Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.

I don't like LA. The majority just seem to be so artificial. Look at how they worship everything they think is fashionable. Isn't it sick?

If you have children, you don't want to have drugs and drinks in the house. It's just not good.

Our passion is our strength.

I don't want to limit myself musically. It would be really limiting if we'd neglect something we really want to do, like explore other styles of music.

The first time that you escape from home or the small town that you live in - there's a reason a small town is called a small town: It's because not many people want to live there.

What is going on in America is extreme. The youth cult, they worship youth so much it's almost paranoid. And LA is the Mecca of it all; they're taking it to the hilt.

I'm very monogamous.

A punk concert isn't fun without a pit.

Moshing and broken glass just don't go together.

I sound like an Englishman impersonating an American impersonating an Englishman.

What annoys the hell out of me is the arrogance of some people. They don't even listen to our music, they decided in advance that they don't like it.

We put everything we had into this record, just like we do with every other record that we make.

I'm a father. It isn't just my life any more. I don't want my kid finding bottles in the house or seeing his father completely smashed.

I never thought being obnoxious would get me where I am today.

There's nothing wrong with being a loser, it just depends on how good you are at it.

I'm not going to conform to some consumer need.

We're not a political band. We don't want to tell people what to do or what to think. We just want to tell them to think.

If journalists ask you again and again about the same bands, you'll end up saying you hate them just because you're so fed up with being asked all those stupid questions.