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" The musicals that leave us kind of staggering on our feet are the ones that really reach for a lot. "
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Leave
Feet
Kind
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" The only shows I saw as a kid were that holy trinity: 'Les Miz,' 'Cats,' 'Phantom.' "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I couldn't possibly write 'Next to Normal,' but God, I can weep and watch 'Next to Normal' five times. "
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" 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.' "
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" 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. "
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" The fun for me in collaboration is, one, working with other people just makes you smarter; that's proven. "
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" You know what's a great way of tricking people into thinking you're a genius? Write a show about geniuses! "
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" Biggie and Big Pun were the best storytellers of the '90s. I would get wrapped up in the narrative of what they were talking about. "
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" What's incredible about 'Hamilton,' and the reason you can't get a ticket, is because everyone's responding to it. Everyone is seeing a bit of themselves in it. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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?' "
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" 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. "
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" I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics. "
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" 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. "
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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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" 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.' "
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" Because of the success of 'Hamilton' and 'On Your Feet!' you can't hide behind the old argument of, 'It needs to be bankable, so we can't put all these people of color in the show.' We are bankable. "
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" 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. "
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" Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life... That's a superpower I've been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions. "
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" If Hamilton were on Twitter, he would have been a worse oversharer than me. "
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" What 'Twilight Zone' did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil. "
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" 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. "
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" '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. "
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" I like the quiet it takes to pursue an idea the way I pursued 'Hamilton,' but I couldn't write a book, because there's no applause at the end of writing a book. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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