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" In 'Hamilton,' we're telling the stories of old, dead white men, but we're using actors of color, and that makes the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience. "

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" We love 'Fiddler.' We love 'West Side Story.' I want to be in that club. I want to be in the club that writes the musical that every high school does. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

High School

Story

Want

" The fun for me in collaboration is, one, working with other people just makes you smarter; that's proven. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Collaboration

Fun

" I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. We just knew the rule was you're going to have to work twice as hard. "

" When I was asked to do a song from 'In the Heights' at the White House in 2009, I chose instead to do 'Alexander Hamilton' because I felt like I was meeting a moment. "

" The only other thing that's like video games for me is watching tennis on TV. I can have it on, and there's a rhythmic quality to it - I can be watching Wimbledon or the U.S. Open and still be working. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Games

I Can

" One of my first favorite books was 'The 12 Days of Christmas,' and I would just go up to people and say, 'I can sing 'The 12 Days of Christmas,' and I would make them sit through me reciting it, and I'd go all the way, each time. I've always hooked into lyrics. "

" In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons. "

" If there is a Busta Rhymes of musical theater, it probably is Mandy Patinkin. "

" My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Responsibility

Time

" Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the 'I'm a Fraud' phase. You go through the 'I'll Never Finish' phase. And every once in a while you think, 'What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it's received as such?' "

" I made a movie when I was 15 years old with all my friends. This is when IMDb was a little more lax with its proceedings, so it's listed as one of my projects. I was 15 years old; it's a terrible movie. I wrote 50 percent of it because I wanted to kiss this one girl, and I wrote a kissing scene for it. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Friends

Kiss

" 'West Wing' was huge. Like 'Hamilton,' it pulls back the curtain on how decision-making happens at the highest level, or at least how you hope it would be. The amount of information Aaron Sorkin packs into a scene gave me this courage to trust the audience to keep up. "

" Sometimes a line enters your head, and you're so grateful for it. You go online to check to see if anyone wrote it before you. You must have stolen it. "

" The reason 'Hamilton' works is because there is no distance between that story that happened 200-some-odd years ago and now, because it looks like America now. It helps create a connection that wouldn't have been there if it was 20 white guys on stage. "

" I think I'm always subconsciously trying to write the ideal school play. Lots of parts for everybody, great parts for women - don't forget, more girls try out than boys in the school play; everyone gets to be in the school play. "

" History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it. "

" Everything we know about Hamilton, we knew when he was alive, because he told us. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Alive

" I only know how to write musicals. "

" I don't differentiate between black and Latino actors. We're in the same struggle to be represented in a way that's even close to honest. And I can tell you that the amount of Latino characters I can point at and say, 'That's what my life experience looks like' - I can't think of any off the top of my head besides Jimmy Smits in 'Mi Familia.' "

" You could do a 'Les Mis'-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you're writing a typical song - that's maybe got 10 words per line. "

" I can't say I have enough experience with Hollywood to feel that I've encountered racism there. I can tell you that I did about five fruitless years of auditioning for voiceovers where I did variations on tacos and Latin accents, and my first screen role was as a bellhop on 'The Sopranos.' "

" We've had characters like Trump in American politics forever, characters who trade on xenophobia. "

" You know what's a great way of tricking people into thinking you're a genius? Write a show about geniuses! "

" I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics. "

" If Hamilton were on Twitter, he would have been a worse oversharer than me. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Been

Than

" Pretty much anything William Shatner is in is great. He's great at playing that 'I'm the only one sane in the world' character. "

" The only shows I saw as a kid were that holy trinity: 'Les Miz,' 'Cats,' 'Phantom.' "

" A lot of the reason the Universal version of 'Heights' went away is that they were afraid they didn't have a big enough Latino star to bankroll this movie. The people I dealt with at the studio who wanted to make this movie were very passionate about it. "

" I like to separate the music- and lyric-writing processes if I can. I'll sort of noodle around on my keyboard and my computer until I have a beat or a chord progression, I'll record it as a loop, export it to iTunes, then walk around with the loop and sort of talk to myself in the loop, and that's how I get the lyrics. "

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Myself

Music

" The musicals that leave us kind of staggering on our feet are the ones that really reach for a lot. "