Daveed Diggs

“I can jump really high, yeah. I'm proud of that. I'll take it.”

“I call myself a nerd all the time.”

“If you do enough rap shows, you get a pretty good sense of an audience. You start to develop this sense of what a feeling of a room or a group is.”

“The act of being nice to somebody at Starbucks is actually a huge thing. It's a real change you can effect in somebody's life every day.”

“I make the energy to go out. You can't let the Broadway schedule run you.”

“To walk into a casting room full of people who look like you is a crazy thing. What is the thing that necessitates all of us having the exact same shade of skin and having the same hair? What about this deodorant commercial needs that?”

“I didn't aspire to be on Broadway.”

“I get to say 'no' to a lot of things. That, for an artist, is crazy.”

“Neither of my parents live in Oakland anymore. They both got priced out.”

“I think people understand I'm not actually the real Thomas Jefferson.”

“Learning how to get a point across is pretty useful in any situation.”

“I love that 'Black-ish' is a pretty traditional sitcom, structurally. It functions like the sitcoms from the '80s and '90s that I grew up with.”

“My favorite Prince album is 'Sign o' the Times.'”

“I've always been a fan of 'Black-ish.'”

“Writing rap songs is about flow, about one word blending seamlessly into the next and creating a thing that is possible to perform in a way that feels natural.”

“Often, the people I'm working with on music are separate from the rest of my life.”

“To be rapping in a musical on Broadway is just - that sentence doesn't make any sense in my brain.”

“I warm up a lot harder for a Clipping show than I ever did for 'Hamilton.'”

“We're very used to seeing a huge diversity of white people. You never just expect two white people on TV to feel the same way.”

“Being with a bunch of people who never take a day off means that you're not taking a day off.”