Ocean: "Self-serving, arrogant, pretentious, controlling, stubborn, inconsistent, morally grey… Gorgeous, modest, compassionate, genius, honest, kind, reliable, rare human being. I’ll take the positive and not so positive adjectives about me in stride."

Ocean: "Art's everything we hope life would be, a lot of times."

Ocean: "The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?"

Ocean: "As a writer, as a creator, I'm giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain't got to pry beyond that."

Ocean: "It started to weigh on me that I was responsible for the moves that had made me successful, but I wasn't reaping the lion's share of the profits, and that was problematic for me."

Ocean: "My point of view from one emotional state to another is a different point of view."

Ocean: "If I start to tell a story and then I decide not to tell the story anymore, I can stop. It’s my story. The expectation for artists to be vulnerable and truthful is a lot, you know?—when it’s no longer a choice. Like, in order for me to satisfy expectations, there needs to be an outpouring of my heart or my experiences in a very truthful, vulnerable way. I’m more interested in lies than that. Like, give me a full motion-picture fantasy."

Ocean: "Boys do cry, but I don't think I shed a tear for a good chunk of my teenage years."

Ocean: "I have no delusions about my likability in every scenario. I know that in order to get things done the way you want them, oftentimes your position will be unpopular."

Ocean: "My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth."

Ocean: "We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I'm going to be alive, I want to be challenged - to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn't an easy way, but it's a rewarding way."

Ocean: "I'm big on what's in good taste."

Ocean: "Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there's always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?"

Ocean: "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."

Ocean: "I think we all change each other's paths. I don't know which law idea that is in physics, but I don't think any of us can live without affecting one another."

Ocean: "All in all, I just don't trust journalists - and I don't think it's a good practice for me to trust journalists."

Ocean: "How we experience memory sometimes, it's not linear. We're not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we're just seeing it in flashes overlaid."

Ocean: "A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life."

Ocean: "In art, at a certain level, there is no 'better than.' It's just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised."

Ocean: "I play piano every day. I enjoy that."

Ocean: "Being singer/songwriter implies versatility and being able to create more than one medium, and R&B artist is a box, simple as that. It is 'that's what you do, that's what you are', and that's a little unfair, to me, because I don't just do that. So I like singer/songwriter because it allows me to move a little bit more freely."

Ocean: "I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication."

Ocean: "As long as your intentions are solid and about growth and progression and being productive and not being idle, then you're doing good in my book."

Ocean: "I'm in this business to be creative - I'll even diminish it and say to be a content provider."

Ocean: "Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically."

Ocean: "It's not always easy to be transparent about your emotions and sometimes the music can get heavy."

Ocean: "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."

Ocean: "It's not essential for me to have a big debut week; it's not essential for me to have big radio records."

Ocean: "Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited - that has music and rhythm and time."

Ocean: "Sometimes I'm fascinated with how famous my work could be while I'm not so famous."

Ocean: "I can't usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it's new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it's about function."

Ocean: "Because I'm not in a record deal, I don't have to operate in an album format."

Ocean: "I need to know how many records I've sold, how many album equivalents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we're gonna be playing shows or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something."

Ocean: "I can operate in half-a-song format."

Ocean: "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."

Ocean: "When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, 'No, I'm just going to write what I feel I should write.'"

Ocean: "I might just write a novel next. I don't know!"

Ocean: "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."

Ocean: "I worked my face off."

Ocean: "I won't touch on risky, because that's subjective. People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don't necessarily merit fear."

Ocean: "It's hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure."

Ocean: "I wrote 'Channel Orange' in two weeks. The end product wasn't always that gritty, real-life depiction of the real struggle that happened."

Ocean: "The work is the work. The work is not me."

Ocean: "I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder."

Ocean: "I don't ever want to be caught up in a system of thinking I can do one thing 'cos that's just... that's just telling yourself a lie."

Ocean: "I believe that I'm one of the best in the world at what I do, and that's all I've ever wanted to be."

Ocean: "We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor - got her master's with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure."

Ocean: "The Internet made fame wack and anonymity cool."

Ocean: "Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I'm watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they're painted, could be art. With music, you're a little bit limited, of course, because it's only audio."

Ocean: "When you're happy you enjoy the music, but when you're sad you understand the lyrics."

Ocean: "I remember feeling no attachment to music necessarily, more an attachment to what music could bring if I succeeded, you know, financially. And that meant freedom from my situation at the time, and maybe what I was projecting onto my own future."

Ocean: "If someone breaks your heart, just punch them in the face. Seriously. Punch them in the face and go get some ice cream."

Ocean: "In art, at a certain level, there is no 'better than.' It's just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised."

Ocean: "The idea of recognizing your strengths and using them in as versatile a way as you can is cool to me."

Ocean: "People are just afraid of things too much … Sure, evil exists, extremism exists. Somebody could commit a hate crime and hurt me. But they could do the same just because I'm black. They could do the same just because I'm American."

Ocean: "I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake's important."

Ocean: "We all know we have a finite period of time. I just feel if I'm going to be alive, I want to be challenged - to be as immortal as possible. The path to that isn't an easy way, but it's a rewarding way."

Ocean: "I'm extremely compassionate, loving, all of those warm fuzzy things, but the outer shell doesn't project that all the time."

Ocean: "I need to know how many records I've sold, how many album equivalents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we're gonna be playing shows or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something."

Ocean: "I don't fear anybody... at all."