A biography for Frank Oceanhasn’t been written yet.
“I make pop culture.”
“I can operate in half-a-song format.”
“I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.”
“You just do what you can and you have as much fun as possible.”
“The work is the work. The work is not me.”
“Super-envious of the fact that Daft Punk can wear robot helmets and be one of the most famous bands in the world, while also understanding that will never be my situation.”
“I've always wanted to make a career in the arts, and I think that my only hope at doing that is to make it more about the work.”
“This has always been my life and no one else's, and that's how it's always been since the day I came in it.”
“It's more interesting for me to figure out how to be superior in areas where I'm naive, where I'm a novice.”
“I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films.”
“I don't have any secrets I need kept any more.”
“Art's everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.”
“The Internet made fame wack and anonymity cool.”
“When you write a song like 'Forrest Gump,' the subject can't be androgynous. It requires an unnecessary amount of effort.”
“I guess I'm just inspired to tell stories.”
“It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.”
“I grew up in New Orleans. I had just moved into my dorm at the University of New Orleans, and I was doing laundry, and my mom called me, like, 'We've got to evacuate. There's a hurricane's coming.'”
“My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.”
“People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don't necessarily merit fear.”
“In the studio, we adhere to a strict colour code. Developed over decades, the colour code consists of a finite and precise colour palate... The whole world as we experience it comes to us through the mystic realm of colour.”