I've been doing Nixon pretty much my whole professional life. I was in this comedy group called the Credibility Gap in Los Angeles when he was president. I was doing Nixon on the radio, and when we did live shows I physicalized him - if that's a word - for the first time. And then I did a Nixon sketch on a very short-lived NBC show called Sunday Best.

Harry Shearer

Categorized in : President Sunday Nbc

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

Harry Shearer

political power doe

The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality.

Harry Shearer

maintaining hardest appearance

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

Harry Shearer

desperation inspiration people

When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there's a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he's still taping.

Harry Shearer

three heaven two

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

cheesy politics guy

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

two years school

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

sleep writing kids

If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.

Harry Shearer

senators republican today

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.

Harry Shearer

friday doe night

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 connections independent

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 stars parent

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

collaboration people thinking

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

cameras cutting years

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

two years school

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

trying art thinking

I'm not sure that there's anybody else that's as psychologically complex and who's given us this window into his soul that Nixon gave us. That's what I find absolutely addictive and seductive.

Harry Shearer

seductive soul window

The act of getting married, stripped of the necessity to have a secure setting to raise children, seems to me no less grim than registering your emotions with the government.

Harry Shearer

emotion government children

[The word class has] been excised from the acceptable political vocabulary, except in the limited usage of right-wingers when they accuse liberals of inciting 'class warfare' - a charge that means it's okay for rich people to vote their economic interests but it's not all right to encourage poor people to do so.

Harry Shearer

vocabulary class mean

I was a Political Science major.

Harry Shearer

political-science political science

Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then.

Harry Shearer

able running war