Harry Shearer Quotes

#1. I was never into candy and games and clowns.

Harry Shearer

#2. That was Embassy Pictures, they went bankrupt shortly after This is Spinal Tap came out.

Harry Shearer

#3. I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines, nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.

Harry Shearer

#4. 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.

Harry Shearer

#5. [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.

Harry Shearer

#6. I was a Political Science major.

Harry Shearer

#7. 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.

Harry Shearer

#8. My parents didn't want me to be a regular in a series. I was a working actor from time to time but they thought was a little too much being a star of a series. They wanted me to have a slightly more normal childhood.

Harry Shearer

#9. Anybody who says that having the public recognize them and relate to the work they do is irritating should get into another line of work. You're in this business for people to know what you do and like it.

Harry Shearer

#10. A movie script more than anything else is a plan of action for the crew. Everybody in the crew looks at the script to see what they're going to do. It has to contain where you are, and how many people are there, and what they do, and what time of day it is, and what time of year it is.

Harry Shearer

#11. Privilege has its own way of seeing the world.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#13. Here's a guy [Richard Nixon] who had no gift for small talk, never liked to be around strangers, was physically awkward, and he goes into the one business that calls for ease with strangers and a gift for small talk.

Harry Shearer

#14. When I did that first movie, it was the introduction to all the set-up time and the waiting time that's endemic in motion pictures, and the repetition.

Harry Shearer

#15. I'd always loved radio.

Harry Shearer

#16. I would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially.

Harry Shearer

#17. I happened upon a memoir by a midlevel White House staffer, and he had been in the room that [Nixon's last] night [in office]. This guy's memoir told me what Nixon's last words were. And they were, on August 8, 1974, to the crew: "Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!" That was just so bizarre.

Harry Shearer

#18. 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."

Harry Shearer

#19. 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

Harry Shearer

#20. 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.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#22. We're very pleased to be on a show which is known and loved around the world.

Harry Shearer

#23. As a kid, I really did want to hang out with the grownups, so it was hanging out with the hippest grownups in the world. This was the nicest bunch of people I've worked with in show business, with the exception of the people around A Mighty Wind. It really was a wonderful eight years.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#25. 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.

Harry Shearer

#26. You know, radio was a really easy way to do the shows. You'd come in, do a read-through, there'd be a few rehearsals, then you'd come the night of the show and do it in front of the audience and then go home.

Harry Shearer

#27. Well Washington DC what are you going to do. They think the capitol steps are the state of the art in comedy. You try to drag them into the 20th century let alone the 21st and they refuse to come with you.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#29. Democrats always like to brag that their guys are smarter than the opponents and Republicans always like to brag that their guys are more moral than the opponents. But if you're looking for morals in politics you're looking for bananas in the cheese department.

Harry Shearer

#30. When I was growing up, we learned our history almost as lives of the saints. And it came as a shock, "Oh, Jefferson had slaves?" It always comes as a shock to us that elevation to the White House didn't somehow cleanse them of all their deep character flaws.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#32. 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.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#34. 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.

Harry Shearer

#35. Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then.

Harry Shearer

#36. I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#39. 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.

Harry Shearer

#40. 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.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#44. Bush is a frat boy in the White House but we've had that before. But I wasn't one of those people that was threatening to leave the country. By the way none of those people have left the country. Alec Baldwin is still here.

Harry Shearer

#45. 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.

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#47. 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."

Harry Shearer

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

Harry Shearer

#49. 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.

Harry Shearer

#50. 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.

Harry Shearer