Quotes from Harry Shearer

Doing voices is like singing and remembering songs.

I think I've ascended to the point after a lot of years where I'm kind of OK on bass.

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.

That's life's big joke: we all end up looking like Mr. Burns.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Rock n' roll doesn't change. All the idiocies and pretension continue.

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

'Spinal Tap' began as a mock rock band that we four - Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and myself - developed for an appearance on a TV pilot at the end of the 1970s. On our own initiative, we wrote and recorded most of the songs and performed them live in several music clubs around L.A. before any cameras rolled.

I was a Political Science major.

One of the problems with 'SNL' is that, if you tried to adlib, the director would put you off camera and off the mic, so only you would know that you ever did it. The director always directed to the script; he wasn't listening to what you were doing. He was calling shots whilst looking at the page.

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.

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.

Behind the ambitious, creative talent that is Hollywood lies a darker side of the entertainment industry little appreciated by the ordinary moviegoer. It's an opaque world of film financing, revenue accretion, and minimal profit share.

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

I like Mr. Burns because he is pure evil. A lot of evil people make the mistake of diluting it. Never adulterate your evil.

I love to see what real human behavior looks like. I've always envisioned my job as just observing and noting that and, for the purposes of my work, just cutting out the boring parts.

I always thought, as a kid, if you - and the reason that I sort of stayed away from doing one character on a sitcom is - if you're doing one thing all the time, the audience is going to come up to you and say the one thing all the time.

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.