Harry Shearer Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“Privilege has its own way of seeing the world.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“If you're going to do something that lasts 90 minutes, you can't really do it with stick figures.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“Music can happen with equal ease as a solo or collaborative venture, it seems to me.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“I think in most cases, if you're with good people, comedy creation happens faster in collaboration. That's how I can tell if it's a good collaboration: If it's faster than me by myself, then it works. If it's slower than me by myself, then I get out of the room.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“Music often happens even faster than comedy in terms of the creation.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“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 -
“Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“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 -
“I was never into candy and games and clowns.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Because I don't do stand-up, radio has always been my equivalent, a place to stay in connection with the public and force myself to write every week and come up with new characters. Plus it's a medium that – having grown up with it and putting myself to sleep with a radio under my pillow [as a kid] – I love. No matter what picture you want to create in the listener's mind, a few minutes of work gets it done.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.”
-- Harry Shearer -
“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 -
“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 -
“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
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