Top 60 Andrew Lloyd Webber Quotes

I have always tried with my shows – win, lose, or draw – to take the boundaries of music as far as I can.

I’m not a critic, and I never talk about other people’s work.

Two pieces of advice for young composers: Go away during technical rehearsals. And do not have a back operation.

When we finally came to start work on this, the joy was it was only Joel and I, we didn’t have to answer to anybody, and we didn’t have to submit a screen play or anything like that. We just wrote it and then made it.

Because her voice is, it’s like the muscles and it develops all the time. That was the fantastic thing for us.

If you look at my career… I couldn’t possibly have chosen those subjects if I was thinking, ‘That’s a great commercial idea.’ I’m not aware of a great musical where someone has done that.

Musical theatre history is littered with bad reviews for now classic pieces.

I’m going to take the kids away over Christmas but I don’t, I’ve written 14 musicals now, I don’t want to rush into doing something just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it when I find a story.

I guess the thing is that we remained huge friends after the original Phantom movie, when we decided it wouldn’t take place and we just saw each other socially over the years so we were friends.

It may sound amazing to people today, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were considered by – how can I put it? – the sort of opinion-making tastemakers and everything to be ‘off the scale as sentimental.’

You’re the luckiest person in the entire world if you know what you really want to do, which I was lucky enough to know when I was very young. And you’re the luckiest person in the world if you can then make a living out of it.

You never know what will happen. There is a thing called zeitgeist. You have to hit it.

One would be lying if one didn’t say that one had melodies that I keep in my back pocket.

At one point I couldn’t move or get out of bed or anything. I developed blood clots because I’d been completely inactive. Then they thought – because the pain was so much – I had an infection in the bones, so they gave me pills, which gave me a tummy infection. It’s like a French farce.

People in Britain always think of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ as a musical – it wasn’t.

The plot of my ‘Phantom’ is pretty much mine. It’s based on the Gaston Leroux book – I’ve taken a lot of liberties with it.

All I’ve ever tried to do is get the best out of people and to bring a bit of humour into it. Unlike, say, ‘The X-Factor,’ which may be great TV, but has no humour at all.

After I had prostate cancer, I had something which was misdiagnosed which led to a load of back operations.

What strikes me is that there’s a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference.

I want to get every church in the country on Wi-Fi.

Superstar was made so early in my career I had nothing to do with it at all. The first time I saw it was the opening screening.

I think Michael Crawford realised, I think we all realised, once we’d gone the route of casting a very young girl, you can’t really cast a 65 year old man opposite. Slightly different resonance I think. No, we weren’t going to go there. We’d have Jack Nicholson in the lead.

I haven’t written a score that’s going to change the Western world or the musical as we presently know it.

I knew nothing about film at all. I suppose the biggest surprise is all these things. In the theatre we sort of do, I might do two or three key interviews and that would be it.

Negative things, and they were all deliberate and I’m not going to say who they were but I know who they were and it was in the business, and that’s not a good sign.

I’m a composer, and therefore I know when I’ve written a good tune. When you’ve written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song.

Musicals are very collaborative. Unless you find somebody who wants to do something with you and has equal commitment, it’s not going to work.

I don’t really care very much if I don’t think that the critics really understand music.

Where I have come unstuck sometimes has mostly been to do with the stories not being quite right or not connecting with a contemporary audience.

And it sort of jogged a memory of something that I read at school and I read it, and I thought God this is it. So you never can tell. I could find something this afternoon.

I’ve got to find something and if I find something that I like, I’ll do it. If I don’t, I won’t.

Well we’d just seen Gerry. I think he wanted somebody who had that authority and was handsome. The thing is, he’s a big hunk isn’t he? All I can say, if you look at his chat line, or the Phantom website, it’s quite worrying. Because the girls really seem to love him.

A couple of back operations didn’t cure anything, but instead, things got worse and worse and worse.

You cannot help but notice that schools that take music seriously tend to be more academically successful.

People like to put you into a box. I’m afraid I don’t sit in a box.

I think the thing’s that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven’t come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50’s when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn’t win the Tony Award.

Music, architecture and pictures have always been my passions, and all that material wealth has meant for me, is being able to have some of the pictures I liked.

Disgracefully, the arts have too often borne the brunt of short-sighted cuts to educational budgets.

I think that the wonderful advantage we have in the film of being able to cast a girl as young as Emmy and which we couldn’t do in the theatre of course because no girl of 16 or 17 could sing 8 shows a week, couldn’t sing two.

Well the least favourite question is the one that one’s asked particularly about in Japan is what’s the difference between theatre and cinema and I think, well, that’s about eighty bucks.

I do want to write again. I hope to. But it’s also important for me to realize, as I get older, that I don’t have to be doing everything all at once.

What I can’t tell is, I don’t know if there’s a subliminal resistance to the idea of a sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ anyway.

I put a hell of a lot of myself into ‘Love Never Dies,’ and I felt quite drained afterwards.

I think back at the time, if it had been 1988, I would have thought Michael and Sarah probably would have been cast but I don’t think, I think it’s much better that the girl is younger and if Sarah would have been 26 or 27 then.

Sometimes I get the story wrong, or it’s the wrong story, and then things don’t work.

I’m wondering whether to have someone go around with my mobile to completely throw everybody off the scent. I could appear in weird places.

We try to get the best performance out of the artists. There is no point in saying to them, ‘You’re useless.’

Together, we can nurture the talent of the future and bring the empowering force of music and the arts to a new generation.

Glenn Slater is my lyricist who, of the new young lyricists coming along, is the most exciting, I think.

The moment the doctor said he wanted to do a biopsy, in my heart I thought I’d probably got it. But I also know a lot of people who have also had prostate cancer, so I had a reasonably good idea what to expect.

The one thing I have always felt about musical theatre is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, about construction.

If you just want ten songs to fit somebody else’s script, then I’m not really the composer for that.

I’ve often thought that we left the original ‘Phantom’ with a little bit of a cliff hanger, and I thought, ‘Well, why not to do a sequel to it’ at one point.

Two years ago I hadn’t even thought of the Woman in White, and I was doing a television show and I said I hadn’t found a story and the next day somebody rang me and said have you ever thought of the Woman in White.

I began to think, now is the time. I found quite a lot of opposition in Hollywood about the idea of doing a film musical and we ended up having to buy the rights back. I’m glad we did because it meant John and I were able to make exactly the movie we wanted.

I don’t know what really makes a great musical or not. In the end, you write it, and you write it because you want to write it.

‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, bigger even than ‘Cats’ which, in itself, I never thought we’d top.

It never occurred to me that ‘Phantom of the Opera’ was the sort of subject that I’d want to do, because I just thought it was something that would be a bit jokey. ‘Til I read the book.

I would have gone right ahead but the only thing, the only phenomenon that’s going on now of course, which is different in my experiences, is that you are getting things planted in the Net by people about the Woman in White on the Net. That’s not a nice change.