Top 40 Harry Shearer Quotes

To me, the funniest American of the Twentieth Century is Richard Nixon because he had the most to hide, and he was so bad at hiding it. To me, that’s what’s really funny – people who think they’re doing a great job of hiding stuff, and it just keeps leaking out.

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

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

I’ll always watch anything that Steve Coogan does in the character of Alan Partridge.

I believe London is the city New York wants to be when it grows up. I love the wealth of cultural resources that a city of that size can offer. I also believe I don’t have to sacrifice all of my standards for human behavior to avail myself of them.

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.

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

My job is to take what I think is funny and to make other people think it’s funny, too.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 was a Political Science major.

Perhaps not unusually for a popular film produced over three decades ago, there have been a dizzying parade of corporate characters trading rights to ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ through the years. Yet our requests for timely statements of the film’s income have been met with a series of slammed doors.

Doing voices is like singing and remembering songs.

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

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.

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

The right-wingness of Fox is basically the news channel. I don’t think the broadcast network has any politics at all. It’s sub-political at best.

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.

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.

I’m lucky that I can walk down the street, and maybe one person will recognise me from ‘The Simpsons,’ and another person will recognise me from ‘Spinal Tap,’ and it’s always surprising.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Bryce Canyon isn’t as famous as the Grand Canyon, but it is just incredible – nothing compares to it.

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.

Most Americans never work as hard as when they’re trying to appear normal, and in New Orleans, we just don’t bother with that.

I do stretches every morning and serious yoga. Not the hot, sweaty type – I don’t believe yoga is calisthenics in fancy pants. I practise a variant of hatha yoga.

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

I never wanted to do a regular sitcom, because I’d be incredibly bored doing the same character week in, week out. But the beauty of ‘The Simpsons’ is that it’s 15, 16, 17 characters. It’s the variety that keeps it interesting. And hey, they’re all my children.

‘Leave It To Beaver’ is a fairly famous show in America, but I don’t think it travelled. It was one of those typical ’50s family comedies. I was in the pilot episode as sort of the dark presence: my character was called Eddie Haskill.