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" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Me
Walk
Street
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" I'll always watch anything that Steve Coogan does in the character of Alan Partridge. "
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Does
" 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
House
Guy
Last
" 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. "
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White
Boy
Way
" '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. "
Harry Shearer
Band
Music
Myself
" I was a Political Science major. "
Harry Shearer
Political
Political Science
Science
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Morning
Serious
Pants
" 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
Never
Loss
Leave
" 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
Try
Alone
Art
" I think I've ascended to the point after a lot of years where I'm kind of OK on bass. "
Harry Shearer
Bass
Years
Where
" 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
Good
Camera
Director
" People don't play music in New Orleans for the reasons they do in Nashville or L.A. - to become stars or to get rich - they play because they've got to. It's in the streets, in their family, in their blood. "
Harry Shearer
Stars
People
Music
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
World
Creative
Talent
" 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
You
Easy
Home
" You have to do real acting, not just do a voice. "
Harry Shearer
You
Acting
Just
" That's life's big joke: we all end up looking like Mr. Burns. "
Harry Shearer
Big
Looking
Like
" I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines, nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation. "
Harry Shearer
Who
I Am
Thrive
" 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
You
Moral
Morals
" 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
Childhood
Parents
Time
" 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
Digital
Myself
Revolution
" Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties. "
Harry Shearer
Well
Eighties
Late
" Doing voices is like singing and remembering songs. "
Harry Shearer
Remembering
Songs
Doing
" 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
State
Two
Year
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Rights
Doors
Years
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Problems
Looking
Camera
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Fox
Think
Any
" If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure? "
Harry Shearer
Pure
You
Make
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Character
Doing
Thought
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Children
Character
Beauty
" My family was lower middle class, and my parents both worked, so we couldn't take proper vacations. We'd go for three days to Santa Barbara or to the desert, so my first real vacation came was when I was 12, when friends of my parents were taking their kids away. We went to Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Park in Arizona and Utah. "
Harry Shearer
Vacation
Parents
Three
" 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. "
Harry Shearer
Work
Trying
Normal