Billie Joe Armstrong Song Quotations

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 was on drugs when I wrote some of my songs. It was a rough time for me, but I'm lucky enough to be one of the people who learned from that experience and moved on, where other people just got addicted and more addicted and more addicted until it killed them.

I'm a songwriter-I'm obligated to keep pushing myself.

One thing I can't do is do anything half-assed. I want to make sure everything is right, that the song is fully realized.

Just seeing the things on TV and the things in front of you, the amount of information coming in, and the lack of information not coming in, how could you not help but write songs about it.

I just want to write good songs that people love, which is a tough thing to do.

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.

We never fit in completely to [the punk] scene because we were writing love songs that were heartfelt and endearing. Some of the punks didn't know what to make of us, but I finally realized that was what made us punk. We sang what we meant, from the heart, and didn't worry about what anyone was going to think.

When we were making the record, I just decided, at the last second. I thought, "This song ["Ordinary World"] makes a lot of sense, being on the album [Revolution Radio]."

Just because you sing songs about a certain feeling doesn't mean you have to go feeling that way forever. You can sing about that for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to change in your own life.

And for our fans, they're just crazy people anyway. I always look at people in a Green Day shirt, and I think, 'What's wrong with that person? What kind of hang-ups does that person have?' Obviously, it's not just the catchy songs, it goes deeper than that.

I wrote a song called 'Green Day' because I was smoking a lot of dope.

Songs are like a form of chaos that you can control. It's a form of intelligence that maybe you only understand and you hope that someone else can understand. And you can be anyone you want: you can be as grandiose as you want or you can be as down in the gutter as you want. It's just sort of whatever emotional freeway you're on at the time.