Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it grabs me and holds me, facinates me. And then I'll run out and something about it... I write for fun.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. ... (when asked who wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening') Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song. ... Good authors, too, who once knew better words now use only four-letter words writing prose. ... Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

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.