Daveed Diggs Quotes

I’ve always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

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

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

My parents are not together, but they were both always around.

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.

Being on stage, I know my function. I just do the thing.

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

It’s funny because as a rapper, there is – and this is something that Clipping challenges all the time – there is this idea about authenticity as a rapper, in the fact that you rap things that are yours. That’s not what doing a play is. You’re interpreting somebody else‘s words.

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

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

I think people understand I’m not actually the real Thomas Jefferson.

Being an emcee onstage is mostly about crowd control, about monitoring energy levels.

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

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.

The fact that I got to do the ‘Hamilton’ BET Cypher is a totally crazy thing because I’ve watched the BET Cyphers since it started. I’ve seen every one. I study them. Because I’m a rapper. It’s what you do.

As more doors open for me, I try to always bring people who I know through.

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

I miss doing a straight play.

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

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.

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

I have all of Kendrick Lamar on vinyl.

To walk into a casting room full of people who look like you is a crazy thing. What is the thing that necessitates all of us having the exact same shade of skin and having the same hair? What about this deodorant commercial needs that?

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

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.

All the way on the West Coast, never having seen a Broadway show, it was like, ‘They don’t want me. There’s nothing there for me.’ I’d come to New York a lot and never even tried to see a Broadway show. There was no reason for me to do that.

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.

I have a recognizable silhouette.

I think rappers spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is new. ‘How can I say this in a way that no one has ever said it before?’

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.

As a kid, you don’t have a ton of spaces where you are honored, where what you think is honored and what you say is revered.

I sort of have this feeling about change in general. We can make baby steps on a macro level. We can try to shift policy, voting and changing who’s in office. But we can make huge, sweeping changes on a personal level and in your immediate circle, or just the people around you.

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.

The reason you write something that is exciting and visceral is to force people to hear what you have to say, especially if you’re in any kind of marginalized community where people don’t want to listen. You have to come up with tricks to make them listen.

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

Being with a bunch of people who never take a day off means that you’re not taking a day off.

There’s no reason for somebody who’s good at writing rap to be good at freestyling. They’re different parts of your brain. You can develop both skills. I’m a much better writer.

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.

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.

College was the first time I felt I really had to choose who my friends were.

I didn’t aspire to be on Broadway.

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.

What writing a poem really does – and what figuring how to perform effectively really does – is forces people to listen to you. It frames your thoughts in such a way that grabs people’s attentions and forces them to hear the things that you’re actually saying.