A biography for Lin-Manuel Mirandahasn’t been written yet.
“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 grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. We just knew the rule was you're going to have to work twice as hard.”
“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.”
“'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.”
“If there is a Busta Rhymes of musical theater, it probably is Mandy Patinkin.”
“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.”
“The musicals that leave us kind of staggering on our feet are the ones that really reach for a lot.”
“The only shows I saw as a kid were that holy trinity: 'Les Miz,' 'Cats,' 'Phantom.'”
“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.”
“I only know how to write musicals.”
“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.”