Billie Joe Armstrong

“Punk has always been about doing things your own way. What it represents for me is ultimate freedom and a sense of individuality.”

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

“I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.”

“A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.”

“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'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.”

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

“For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on 'Madden'.”

“There's an honesty in our family - my kids and I are able to talk about things without me putting the fear of God into them.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“There are a lot of bands who claim to be punk and they only play the music, they have no clue what it's all about. It's a lifestyle. It's not about popularity and all that crap.”

“And you don't want to always write about politics just for the sake of writing about politics.”

“Our passion is our strength.”