Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

I loved musicals. I loved being in the school play and being lucky enough to get parts in the school play. But they always took place in some other time and place.

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.

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

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.'

'Rent' was the show that made me want to write. Or that showed me you're allowed to write.

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.

I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.

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 couldn't possibly write 'Next to Normal,' but God, I can weep and watch 'Next to Normal' five times.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I get called in for stuff for Hollywood, I get to be the best friend of the Caucasian leadIf I want to play the main guy, I have found, I have to write it.

The distance between where I am and where I want to be seems impossibly large.

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

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

If you know the voice you're writing for it's such a shortcut. It's such a catalyst to creating the kind of energy you want.