Quotes from Andrew Lloyd Webber

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.

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.

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

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.

I've a rare Turkish swimming cat.

Corny answer is of course is that everyone who wants musicals are children in different ways, aren't they? So you think of them in different ways. There are things of mine I'm sorry haven't come here.

I was about 10, and I was supposed to be playing the piano at the school concert, and I got up in front of the whole school and said, 'I'm sorry. I'm changing the agenda. I want to play some songs I've written.'

My love of musical theater was certainly not typical. I mean, it was considered to be very, very abnormal, in fact!

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

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.

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.

It doesn't stand up to huge intellectual scrutiny.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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'm alive. I have my music; I have my children. I am the luckiest man.

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