Big Sean

“The thing was, at a young age, my mom and my grandma always tried to keep me out of the streets as much as they could, so they put me in a private school when I was super young.”

“I'm really vulnerable onstage because it's just me. I'm not really trying to put up a front or act a certain way.”

“With the super duper flow, I created that one word rhyme style.”

“Kids that I went to school with didn't know how to interact with black people like that. There were only, like, three or four black kids in the class.”

“I grew up on the west side of Detroit - 6 mile and Wyoming - so I was really in the 'hood. And I would go to school at Detroit Waldorf, and that was not the 'hood. Growing up in Detroit was good. I had a good perspective, a well-rounded one, and not being one-sided.”

“I come from a family of scholars who got their Master's degrees. To my grandma - and to a lot of people - an education was a way of making it out of the worst parts of their life.”

“There's definitely a thin line between being tasteful and tacky.”

“My mom graduated from the University of Michigan, which is a great school. Then she got her Master's from NYU. She wanted to be an actress, so when she graduated, she had a dream, and she started following it. She moved to New York and took acting classes with people like Denzel Washington.”

“It was probably in third grade - I had a super-fake gold herringbone chain. Yeah man, it was, like, super fake. I don't remember if it was my mom's or how I got it, but ever since then, I've loved chains. The first real chain I got was from Kanye. It was a Jacob the Jeweler Kanye West Jesus piece.”

“You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things.”

“My mom keeps me going, man. She deserves such a good life. I just wanna give it to her. My dad, too. My family, my friends, they keep me motivated. Just knowing my personal legend, just knowing what I'm supposed to do, that keeps me going.”

“Adidas is just right. They've been, like, a partner I couldn't be more thankful for. I really feel like they've helped increase my popularity. You know? It's tight to be able to attach to their brand and be able to add whatever I can offer to their brand. It's nice to know that they appreciate it. They are always showing love.”

“I've definitely stolen a lot of things.”

“I feel like I definitely have a real sporty style, more so than a lot of people in G.O.O.D. Music.”

“I hate all the old pictures of me before 2010 - and they are always the first ones to come up. That's why I don't Google myself, man.”

“I still got a lot to learn about fashion. I'm somebody who experiments, somebody who's finding their way. I'm young, and I don't really know if there's any guide to style in what's right and what's wrong. I just dress as an extension of how I'm feeling. If I feel crazy, then I'm gonna rock something crazy.”

“You can go up to the editor of 'Vogue,' and she might think I have horrible style, or maybe she thinks I have great style. Who knows? I don't really know too much about it: I just know what I like and what I don't like. I love clothes and making my own clothes and shoes, like I got to do with Adidas.”

“I was a telemarketer in my senior year at high school. I had to sell prosthetic limbs to paralysed veterans. I was making 150 bucks a week and it was horrible.”

“For me, personally, Detroit is a melting pot for everything. We get the best from the East Coast, West Coast and down South.”

“People don't realize I'm a very spiritual person.”