Frank Ocean Quotes

I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Every one of my books had killed me a little more.

People who paint, including myself, get to a point where a bit of angst comes in. If you're doing it for a living, it's worth it to suffer those slings and arrows.

There's way too much pain in this business for anyone who doesn't HAVE to write.

Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.

We know that creative people have all sorts of demons.

I unfortunately do suffer for my art.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.

Our wishes are our most reliable mirror, and the black-and-white movies I'm most drawn to are about artists who suffer because art is a noble thing; suffering is such a small price to pay for the imagination.

It takes a lot of emotional high and struggles to write songs.

Why does my muse only speak when she is uhnhappy? She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

When I have just sat down and tried to write the lyrics of a song, usually about half of it sounds like bullshit. I just have to go away from something and come back to it again later. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.