Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was a Political Science major.
I was never into candy and games and clowns.
You have to do real acting, not just do a voice.
Doing voices is like singing and remembering songs.
That's life's big joke: we all end up looking like Mr. Burns.
I'd always loved radio. I loved Bob And Ray. I loved Stan Freberg.
Music often happens even faster than comedy in terms of the creation.
Rock n' roll doesn't change. All the idiocies and pretension continue.
Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.
The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality.
If Nixon were a Republican senator today, he would have been primaried out.
To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.
We're very pleased to be on a show which is known and loved around the world.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?
Music can happen with equal ease as a solo or collaborative venture, it seems to me.
I'll always watch anything that Steve Coogan does in the character of Alan Partridge.
That was Embassy Pictures, they went bankrupt shortly after This is Spinal Tap came out.
The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.
If you're going to do something that lasts 90 minutes, you can't really do it with stick figures.
Bryce Canyon isn't as famous as the Grand Canyon, but it is just incredible - nothing compares to it.
Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.
I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.
I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.
I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines, nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.
You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.
The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it - so I give us another 50 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.
For a guy who is always banging on about the masculine virtues, Nixon had this remarkable proclivity for very dainty gestures.
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.
Privilege has its own way of seeing the world. It's not about the kind of people they are; it's about the situation they're in.
[C. Montgomery] Burns is much purer evil than Nixon was. I think it's the purity of his evil that attracts me as a comic character.
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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
I wasn't playing Nixon's satirical stick figure. I was playing Nixon the man. As an actor, I felt I had to get to the deeply flawed humanity of the guy.
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 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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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'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.