Harry Shearer Quotes

I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

I was a Political Science major.

I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.

To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.

When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there's a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he's still taping.

The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality.

When it moved to Friday night it disappeared, when they find another show that can do what The Simpsons does, they will be delighted to do cancel The Simpsons.

Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.

Sometimes, songs spill out of you very fast, and sometimes you have to wrangle them to the floor. But the same thing is true of comedy, where sometimes it really flows.

Music can happen with equal ease as a solo or collaborative venture, it seems to me.

The theater business is very much about "Hey, if you want our big blockbuster at Christmas time, you'll play our piece of crap in April."

I have a very strong visual memory of the first time I made him laugh. That was remarkable. I was like, "Oh, God, I just made Jack Benny laugh."

I always used to sit next to Mel Blanc when we'd do the shows. When you have Jack Benny on one side and Mel Blanc on the other, you're not going to go far wrong.

I was never into candy and games and clowns.

I'd always loved radio. I loved Bob And Ray. I loved Stan Freberg.

You can get an awful lot of effects into the customer's mind for a great deal less time and money in radio than you can in television.

The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.

I'm not sure that there's anybody else that's as psychologically complex and who's given us this window into his soul that Nixon gave us. That's what I find absolutely addictive and seductive.

[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.

The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it - so I give us another 50 years.

For a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, Nixon had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures.

The last president we had was the smartest guy anyone could remember and he did the dumbest thing anyone has ever seen in the White House so go figure.

I didn't have a lot of independent film connections. It really took until the digital film revolution came along that I realized that I could do it myself.

I've got an odd, negative bond with C. Montgomery Burns. He reminds a lot of people of bosses they've worked for. He certainly reminds me of someone I'm working for.

The act of getting married, stripped of the necessity to have a secure setting to raise children, seems to me no less grim than registering your emotions with the government.

I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.

In the year and a half I was on SNL, I never saw anybody ad lib anything. For a very good reason - the director cut according to the script. So, if you ad libbed, you'd be off mike and off camera.

Privilege has its own way of seeing the world. It's not about the kind of people they are; it's about the situation they're in.

I wasn't playing Nixon's satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy.

If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.

You have to do real acting, not just do a voice.

If you're going to do something that lasts 90 minutes, you can't really do it with stick figures.

Music often happens even faster than comedy in terms of the creation.

You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.

Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.