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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Lin-Manuel Miranda Quotes

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

There’s been lots of theater that uses hip-hop in it, but more often than not, it’s used as a joke – isn’t it hilarious that these characters are rapping. I treat it as a musical form, and a musical form that allows you to pack in a ton of lyric.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

‘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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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?’

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

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.’

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

I always had an eye toward the stage for the story of Hamilton’s life, but I began with the idea of a concept album, the way Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Evita’ and ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ were albums before they were musicals.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

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.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda

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

– Lin-Manuel Miranda