I was a good student; I was a good boy. I got A's, and I did all the papers right.

I have a great foundation, a great training foundation. But it took me a long time to let the training go.

We don't get to get swept up, because we have to start over every day at 8 o'clock.

I started out with this 'La Boheme' fantasy, but as you get older, the 'La Boheme' fantasy becomes less sexy, believe me.

It's about polarization. You're trying to stir up something in your audience.

At 14, 15 years old, I started reading 'Backstage' regularly. Eventually, I got enough courage to look at the auditions section.

If you're an open channel when you're onstage, if you're just a vessel, things are going to come out that are stored away deep in your DNA.

You go see a great production of 'Romeo and Juliet,' where those kids are full of life and love, you hope and forget.

I want to know that I'm gonna knock 'em dead every night.

I've done a lot of translation in TV, and I can do it. I'm trained to do it. I know how to inject a certain amount of my naturalness into that and where I come from into those things, but it helps if somebody's writing with my experience in mind.

I grew up in Philadelphia.

Oh, Alexander Hamilton fell short of his best self every now and again, and he still managed to do these wonderful things - well, so do I. So what am I capable of?

You can't judge the people that you play anyway; you leave that for somebody else to do.

All I try to do is put as many colors as I can on the canvas every night.

I think for a lot of us, you know, what 'Hamilton' gave us the opportunity to, what it gave me the opportunity to do, was to go, 'Here's what I've learned in 35 years.'

You hear a song like 'Wait For It,' you hear a song like 'Dear Theodosia' - if you get one of those songs in a musical - one - it's worth dropping everything to sing that one song.

We want to pull out songs from the American song book, and we want to make them palatable for a modern audience.

I know it's hard for people to imagine a time when 'Hamilton' wasn't 'Hamilton,' but for years, it was just this little thing that I was telling people about that didn't make any sense to anybody as I was describing it. But I loved it.

I've spent a long time learning my way around a stage as an actor, but this I don't know as well. Humbly, I'm excited to get with a band and perform regularly as an artist and see what I can learn and how I can grow in that space.

If I'm allowed it, I'm really looking forward to a little time on the couch and a little time on a beach in Brazil.

I had no vision of me being a part of that show ever. But I was committed to being the first super-fan of 'The Hamilton Mixtape' that there ever was. I was in love with this thing.

'Hamilton' has restored my faith in theater.

It's not about doing something that's as big as 'Hamilton.' That may never happen again, and that's okay.

I've realized along the way that a lot of things that I do as a performer are about waiting for somebody to write something for me or develop something for me, but music, music was the thing that I don't have to wait for anybody's permission to do.

To get even realer with you for a second, as a black actor, as a performer of color, I don't know how many more roles like Aaron Burr are gonna come along for me.

The record company felt wisely that we should get something out before I left 'Hamilton' or around awards time, and that deadline was not easy.

I'm in no way running from 'Hamilton' or its success or these beautiful songs that I've been blessed to be able to be the one to introduce them. I certainly won't be the last to sing them, but to be the first, I feel very lucky.

There was a lot of the 'Hamilton' experience that was like a locomotive. It was a hurricane, so the apartment often looked like a hurricane. There were clothes and shoes all over. We were getting more things in than we had room for. We had to figure out how to make space for all the blessings and goodness coming toward us.

I'm addicted to growth.

I think that the best songs to sing are songs that you love, because you sing them with love when you love them.

I've been in a long-term relationship, and I'll tell you, it's never boring! People trying to merge their lives together always run into challenges.

The time I spent in New York when I was 17 gave me the confidence to pursue my dreams with my whole heart.

You gotta love this thing. Whatever you choose to pursue - medicine, law, writing, you have to love it. You study it, you eat it, you drink it, you try it, you do it, you love it in every way.

It's still a political statement to stand on stage as a person of color and be excellent. We still need those images to combat the narrative we're often fed - as someone innately inferior or inexorably linked with lack.

My dad was an early hip-hop fan.

We didn't go to Broadway musicals when I was growing up; it was too expensive.

I remember Ella Fitzgerald sort of coming into my life like a bolt of lightning - like, what is that? It was one of the purest examples of God in art that I'd ever seen.

I've dedicated more than 15 years to this theater and television thing; I want to spend the next 10, 15 years or so devoted to music.

I can only imagine what the show would have meant to me as a 16- or 17-year-old. I know what 'Rent' meant to me in my life, how that show changed the course of my life, and we can only hope that 'Hamilton' will have the same effect on a few kids.

I haven't had a chance to decorate my dressing room yet, but I have these pictures of myself as a kid that I want to put up because I said, 'I really want to make sure that I take that kid with me on this journey.' I want him to experience this.

They're people who had flaws and who had affairs and had sex and had scandals, and very rarely do we look at the totality of our heroes' lives.

I'm so excited about my new partnership with the talented and motivated team at S-Curve Records!

What's a better foundation for drama? You have power, you have ambition, you have sex... that's the stuff of drama.

I have to remind myself that it may never be this good again.

What is the future going to say about us now? What are our kids going to look at us and say, 'How could you not stop that person from getting into power? How could you not stop that environmental disaster that you saw coming a mile away?'