One hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today: specifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. It's the reason it's so easy to learn, because it's verse; it's rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.
When you get to live your dream, with singing and dancing and acting and playing these wonderful stories, you really have already won, and you always have to remember that.
I've done acupuncture, and I believe in it. That's the first place I go if I'm having any particular pain anywhere.
I think you have to chase your life even harder than you chase your career.
We are all good at things - a varied assortment of things - and we all desperately need to find out what those things are for our self-esteem. If there is anything young people need, it is confidence and an identity and a purpose.
It doesn't matter how late you get home or how wired you are, you still wake up early with your kids. That's the most important thing you do in a day, whether or not you're in a hit Broadway show.
I'm still learning every night, with every opportunity to write something, to sing something, to perform any work. Every opportunity to do these things brings me further along the journey, and the best part is, no matter how far along I go, I have so much more to learn.
Economics really pervert every possible good thing that comes, whether it's food or a cure or a new technological advancement; anything like that is always stopped by who has access to it.
I've always wanted a family. I've always wanted children. I've always wanted to be a superstar.
You may leave a show, but you never leave that family.
As a child, I loved to sing. When I was 8, my mother sent my brother and me to a summer music theater program in Texas. We did 'Guys and Dolls' at the camp, and I was so depressed when it was over. That's when I realized that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
'Hamilton' is a story about America, and the most beautiful thing about it is... it's told by such a diverse cast with a such diverse styles of music. We have the opportunity to reclaim a history that some of us don't necessarily think is our own.
I always felt like, 'I hope Oprah teaches a class to everybody when they get super famous about how to use, responsibly, that blessing.'
For the first time in my life, in my mid-20s, I started to question things. Had I been deceived? I thought I had been destined for something great - to be Whitney Houston or Jennifer Holliday or Phylicia Rashad. I started to realize that a lot of people think that, and it doesn't happen for almost everyone.
I used to say if there was anything I would really want to have as I kind of get older in my career, it would be wonderful to have relevance to somebody in some way so that I could continue to work on some level.
I don't wear fragrance. The most fragrant I smell is probably from a St. Ives Body Wash. It's not that I don't like it. I just don't necessarily feel like I need to add a fragrance to myself.
I always often say, when I was a kid, I wasn't just playing with baby dolls. I was standing in the mirror with brush in my hand as a microphone singing songs.
It's a trippy and really magical experience when people like Michelle Obama are looking at you saying, 'Great job,' when all you want to do is say, 'Great job,' to the First Lady of our country.
Sleep is the apple a day, really, for singers.
There's a new Mozart, a new Miles Davis, a new Misty Copeland, a new Matisse potentially languishing in a math class somewhere. If we fail to introduce them to art, we fail humanity.
