Top 45 Daveed Diggs Quotes

As a kid, I was very shy.

History is about who tells it.

At some point, I’ll do more McDonald’s commercials if I have to.

I’ve been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

Writing rap songs is about flow, about one word blending seamlessly into the next and creating a thing that is possible to perform in a way that feels natural.

I get to say ‘no’ to a lot of things. That, for an artist, is crazy.

Learning how to get a point across is pretty useful in any situation.

I didn’t know a single musical soundtrack, really, growing up. Nobody listened to musicals. That wasn’t a thing I did.

Hip-hop was indifferent to Broadway. We didn’t need Broadway, but I think Broadway needed hip-hop.

I felt so loved and taken care of, and that’s a huge part of the reason I’m able to do what I do.

That’s the great thing about being a teenager. You think you’re a genius.

I’m fascinated with the regionality of rap music.

Recording vocals has the same kind of physical demands as you experience a lot in theater work.

Writing is writing. It is all about telling stories, and I’ve been doing that for so long, in all realms, that it all feels like the same thing to me anyway.

If a project feels good to you, say yes. And do it with everything that you have and hope that the outcome is good.

I warm up a lot harder for a Clipping show than I ever did for ‘Hamilton.’

I can jump really high, yeah. I’m proud of that. I’ll take it.

I have all of Kendrick Lamar on vinyl.

I have a recognizable silhouette.

Clipping is a very specific, concept-y thing. We have all these rules: we don’t sample drums. We create all our own sounds. I don’t speak in the first person. We come from a background of experimental music like John Cage… Philip Glass.

The act of being nice to somebody at Starbucks is actually a huge thing. It’s a real change you can effect in somebody’s life every day.

I feel like, anytime I’m onstage, I tend to feel very connected with people in the audience or with the sort of heartbeat or tempo of the audience.

I have this thing. I can rap really fast. I can rap really, really fast. It’s a thing I’m good at and I’ve trained myself to do; it’s a thing I do in the Bay Area.

I’m an artist, so days don’t start on any regular time.

My favorite Prince album is ‘Sign o’ the Times.’

To be rapping in a musical on Broadway is just – that sentence doesn’t make any sense in my brain.

I get excited to create things that don’t exist in the same world as ‘Hamilton’ because that world is really well done and doesn’t need me to inform it anymore.

The tricky thing about fast raps is not really the delivery of them; it’s the writing of them, with consonants close enough together that you don’t trip up over them.

The way we make history exciting to learn about is by breaking down the barriers that are already set up between these people.

I was so stressed, man. When I was 17, I was so worried about what the hell was going to happen.

Daveed Diggs is a very nervous person.

My mom is a white Jewish lady, and my dad is black. The cultures never seemed separate – I had a lot of mixed friends. When I was young, I identified with being Jewish, but I embraced my dad’s side, too.

Some people get a Broadway show, and that’s their end game, and they want to sit there for as long as possible. And some people have other things they want to do with their life.

I liked being on stage because it gave me a reason to be around people. The other great thing about acting is it allows you to imagine circumstances different from your own. I was a poor Bay Area kid getting to pretend to be a Russian aristocrat.

Being multiracial has allowed me to feel comfortable walking in all different circles.

Using something that is really painful, generally, as the percussive element for a beat, I think is cool.

I miss doing a straight play.

If you do enough rap shows, you get a pretty good sense of an audience. You start to develop this sense of what a feeling of a room or a group is.

I’ve always been very supported. I’ve never really been sad. I’ve just been broke. They are very different things.

Everybody from the Bay has a superiority complex because we’re dope.

Acting is about finding truth and finding the way to convey the truth.

Broadway was weird.

There’s this thing about authenticity when you rap, right? Whether or not it’s real, it has to feel real.

We’re very used to seeing a huge diversity of white people. You never just expect two white people on TV to feel the same way.

I went to Hebrew school but opted out of a bar mitzvah.