Harry Shearer

“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.”

“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.”

“Doing voices is like singing and remembering songs.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“'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 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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”