Dick Cavett Quotes

Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.

I love my own coincidences and love to hear other peoples' stories.

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.

I had to fight the intellectual label when I started in television, because, first of all, it's not going to help you commercially, and also, it wasn't particularly true of me. I mean, if anybody thought I was an intellectual, they probably had never really seen one.

Every comic can report a few 'gift from the gods' moments.

If I were running a campaign, I'd urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely - on a talented young comedy writer.

History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I'm not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.

I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.

Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training.

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show ... Cops would come by - often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.

I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

Why are people afraid of ghosts? 'Ooh, no, I wouldn't want to see one! I'd be too scared' - accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice - is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I'd think anyone would welcome he opportunity. I've never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.

I'm not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.

It's fun for me to go on other folks' talk shows. When you've endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.

There is something about a Luger that separates it from all other handguns, and Luger devotees and Luger society members speak of it in romantic terms that must sound plain nuts to those who consider themselves level-headed.

I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests' books.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

I feel sorry for the poor kids whose parents feel they're qualified to teach them at home. Of course, some parents are smarter than some teachers, but in the main I see home-schooling as misguided foolishness.

I have a long list of things that make me mad.

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.

It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.

I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn't include someone the size of the Hindenburg.

The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable.

It's lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It's lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

If (O.J. Simpson) is acquitted, I will renounce my citizenship. And if I converse with him at a cocktail party, I will say, 'Well, there are so many people here who haven't murdered anyone. I think I'll go talk to them.' I'll also riot.

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.

Every so often, there is an article saying the old kind of talk show isn't possible now. In the oldest kind of talk show, you only had the choice of that or two other channels!

My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew's and Albert Einstein's.

I'll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.

Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.

Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?

The very phrase 'Oscar night' used to accelerate my pulse. For one thing - dating myself - it meant Bob Hope. He always had good, strong jokes, that faultless delivery, and always a new joke about his own films' failure - once again - to be honored.

Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy's show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.

There are online forms you can fill out to send to your lawmakers, demanding that nothing - nothing at all or in any way - be done about any guns whatever, anywhere.

If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.

I'm the only talk show host, I think, if there's such a category in, what's called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that's long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

I'm sure I've all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer's 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor.

Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease.

I live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.

It was well after college that I learned about depression. I got my first job for Jack Paar. I realized I was sleeping 14 hours a day and just living for the Paar show.

I know what it feels like to be a gun lover.

I confess, I do have to remind myself almost daily that there are people on this earth capable of reading, writing, eating and dressing themselves who believe their lives are ruled from billions of miles away, by the stars - and, of course, the planets.

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

I have a feeling that about 90% of my life has been shaped by my voice, both as an embarrassment and as an advantage. There was always the terrible incongruity of this deep voice barreling out of this little body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that it was ludicrous, that it took on an importance that wasn't really there.

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

I'm not freakishly short. I had, on my show, used shortness as a joke subject; it didn't really bother me.

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn't ailing.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.

William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.

I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.

I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.

The idea that hunting is one against one is ludicrous. It's one animal versus the hunter, the manufacturer of the rifle, the bullet maker, the designer and manufacturer of the telescopic sight, the auto manufacturer who made the car the hunter got to the edge of the wild in, the maker of his waterproof shoes, the various manufacturers of his mittens, glasses, overcoat
and that's only the beginning of the list. The "sportsman" who shoots an animal should then make a speech, like the actor who wins an Oscar does, thanking the multitudes behind the scenes who made this "victory" possible.

Obviously those who burn to be professional jesters mean that they want to be successful comedians. And those are always an elite, microscopic portion of the population. But oh, how they try.

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

There should be three days a week when no one is allowed to say: 'What's your sign?' Violators would have their copies of Kahlil Gibran confiscated.

I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.

I guess the best advice I ever got or anyone could get for doing a talk show, though it has not been easy very often, was from Jack Paar, who said, 'Kid, don't make it an interview. Interviews have clipboards, and you're like David Frost. Make it a conversation.'

To call New York's traffic at holiday time a nightmare is to understate.

It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.

In relative youth, we assume we'll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

I think I have many spenglerian moods about the country, and that some day people will look back and think 'this was a really goofy, unadmirable stupid time.

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.

I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.