By now, most of the world knows the name Lin-Manuel Miranda. He, of course, is the creator of the smash Broadway hit Hamilton. But Miranda is even more accomplished these days.
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Following Hamilton, the now-43-year-old New York City-born artist created another award-winning Broadway musical, In the Heights. He has also written songs for Disney movies like Encanto and The Little Mermaid.
But with all these accomplishments to his name, one might wonder what Miranda has to say about his career, his craft, life and love, and the world at large outside of his prolific songwriting.
Without further ado, here are the 25 best Lin-Manuel Miranda quotes.
1. “The fun for me in collaboration is, one, working with other people just makes you smarter; that’s proven.”
2. “The music you love when you’re a teenager is always going to be the most important to you, and I find that it’s all over the score of Hamilton.”
3. “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.”
4. “History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it.”
5. “I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. We just knew the rule was you’re going to have to work twice as hard.”
6. “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.”
7. “Rent was the show that made me want to write. Or that showed me you’re allowed to write.”
8. “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.”
9. “The musicals that leave us kind of staggering on our feet are the ones that really reach for a lot.
10. “I only know how to write musicals.”
11. “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.”
12. “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.”
13. “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.”
14. “What I learned from my go-round with In the Heights is that it’s tough to make a movie. In Hollywood, even the people in charge have people in charge.”
15. “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.”
16. “You know what’s a great way of tricking people into thinking you’re a genius? Write a show about geniuses!”
17. “What Twilight Zone did was show we all have a great capacity for good and evil.”
18. “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.”
19. “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.”
20. “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.”
21. “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.”
22. “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.”
23. “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.”
24. “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.”
25. “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?’”
Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Disney
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