Lin-Manuel Miranda Quotes

You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.

I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate.

I try my best to live by the principle that if you're going to be telling a story that you didn't live, tell it with as much respect as you can for the people who did live it.

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

The most attractive characteristic in a person is the story they are telling the world. We stop and stare at stories.

I'm not trying to explain other cultures, or to give a fair and balanced account of a country, or the top ten things you need to know. I'm not trying to spread world peace and understanding. I'm not an advocate or an activist or an educator or a journalist. I'm out there trying to tell stories the best I can.

My passion is to tell stories that reflect humanity.

It's nice when you can tell stories that brush up against the world we live in.

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

A story is not only meaning, it's music as well.

You have to find your tone and work within that to make it as real so the audience can really engage in the story you're telling.

Our jobs as artists is to make sure our art tells a real story and let people see themselves in these characters. It's about having a conversation about being better people.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know.

Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.

Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live.

We learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.

I wanted to, you know, get my story out in the world, which, it turns out, is a very misguided notion.

By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it - and what other things you don't hear - you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

You'd tell the world what your best friend wore to sleep if you thought it made a good enough story.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

I think that any story that intends on being culturally authentic and true to life experiences will be a great story. Even if that culture isn't a hip-hop-centric one.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.