Dick Van Dyke Quotes

My wife, as proud as she was of me, hated show business for good reasons. There was something about the spouse always being pushed out of the way, shoved aside. She wanted to get away from it.

Put me on solid ground and I'll start tapping! At my age they say to keep moving.

I think the saddest moment in my life just happened two months ago. My old nightclub partner passed away, Phil Erickson down in Atlanta. He - I owe him everything. He put me in the business and taught me about everything I know.

I'm really in retirement. My career is over. I'm just playing now and having a great time. I like to keep busy, and I'm doing what's fun for me.

I watch 'Al Jazeera.' They have news that you can't find anywhere else. They do great documentaries, too.

The secret to keeping moving is keeping moving.

I don't play golf. I have more fun singing and dancing.

Walt Disney and I always said we were two children looking for our inner adults.

Why is it amazing that I don't act my age? Why should I act my age? Or more to the point, how is someone my age supposed to act? Old age is part fact, part state of mind, part luck, and wholly something best left for other people to ponder, not you or me. Why waste your time? I don't.

I don't have any children; I have four middle-aged people.

I've made peace with insecurity ... because there is no security of any kind.

Stan said he used to keep Hardy late, make him miss his golf game, and really get him mad.

I do miss the rhythms of comedy. And I've never been able to perform very well without an audience. The sitcoms I've done had them. It was like doing a little play.

I was a 'Laurel and Hardy' nut. I got to know Laurel at the end of his life, and it was a great thrill for me. He left me his bow tie and derby and told me that if they ever made a movie about him, he'd want me to play him.

There are people with their iPads are taking pictures so much that they're not experiencing the moment. They go home and look at the pictures later.

I like 'The Office.' I particularly like the British version with Ricky Gervais. Of course, I liked the 'Seinfeld' show a lot. I thought that was an awfully good show.

Oh, I had an idea for a pilot of my own at the time, and then Carl sent me about eight scripts and simply I threw my idea out the window because the writing was just so good.

It wasn't work. I played myself.

You need someone to love, and something to do that you enjoy, and something to hope for, and that's enough for me.

There are tribes all over the world who sing and dance every day as part of their lives. And we oughta do that.

I worked nightclubs all through my 20s, and I was a teetotaler.

I was always in show business but in many ways was not really of show business. I didn't move in show business circles, particularly, still don't do it.

Something greater than me was happening. And yet, it was happening to me.

Carl envisioned a show that would be timeless. He wanted it to be fresh to audiences fifty years down the line.

I loved to fall down.

I agreed with his thesis that God was not an all-powerful "cosmic superman" looking down from the penthouse as much as He was Love.

Once you get the kids raised and the mortgage paid off and accomplish what you wanted to do in life, there's a great feeling of: 'Hey, I'm free as a bird.'

No, no, it was the relationships. That was that group. People believed that Rob and Laura were really married in real life. You know, a lot of people believed that.

My kids are so much better parent than I was.

When I get some budding young comic who'll come up to me and say, 'What was it like to do it in those days?' I try to be as gracious to him as Stan Laurel was to me.

As a younger man, though, I lacked confidence, the confidence that comes with experience. I worried and stressed way more than I should have. Now I see that worrying and stressing never helped accomplish anything. It was only when I let myself go and had fun that the magic happened - and continues to happen. Here

I've won several Emmys, a Tony and a Grammy, so maybe somebody will let me have an Oscar, and then I'll have a full set.

[My mother] once cooked a ham and later found it in my father's shirt drawer. I am not kidding.

So as my kids will tell you, they had a pretty normal life.

I've retired so many times now it's getting to be a habit.

Life is like a box of chocolates, I'm a nerd and I read books

I played a killer twice. Once on 'Matlock,' on Andy Griffith's show, I got to play the killer.

I have two kids who were like me, we get out of bed feeling good, and the other two would sit at the breakfast table and grumble. I think it's born into us. I usually wake up feeling pretty good. Looking forward to the day.

Those songs [Mary Poppins score] didn't just get under my skin, they became a part of me then and there, and thinking about it now, they've never left.

I have also heard and read various accounts of why they [Sheldon Leonard and Carl Reiner] liked me. My favorites? I wasn't too good-looking, I walked a little funny, and I was basically kind of average and ordinary. I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand. Let that be a lesson for future generations.

I learned everything that I know about comedy and about show business and a lot about life from Carl.

The show became its own little world, with its own internal rhythm and high standards.

Julie's voice could have been used to tune a piano. She was pitch perfect - and I never was. I was enjoyably close.

Hope is life's essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning. I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.

We had all week to rehearse. An audience would come in at the end of the week and we'd our little show. Most of the ad- libbing happened during the week on the show.

I've been talking about retiring for years. It's my standard answer to the question, 'What are your future plans?' The truth is, I'll always want to do things that are worthwhile or fun.

I was the class clown, you know, that kind of thing, and I gathered around me a group of guys who also were silly. I was in all the plays and everything. But I don't know, at that time show businesses looked like the moon, you know, it was so far away. I wanted to be a radio announcer.

I asked Fred Astaire once when he was about my age if he still danced, and he said 'Yes, but it hurts now.' That's exactly it. I can still dance, too, but it hurts now!

I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that's literally 70 years.

So I think we're kind of an alternate choice for people who have had it with sex and violence.

He wanted the show to be fresh to audiences 50 years down the line.

I survived - and looking back, I learned not to sweat the little stuff.

When I was a kid, I loved all the silent comedians - Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin. And I used to imitate them. I'd go to see a Buster Keaton movie and come home and try things out I'd seen. I learned to do pratfalls when I was very young.

I have four kids, seven grandkids, and four great-grandkids. Maybe I can become a great-great-grandfather if I hang on!

The best writers were philosophers who wrapped their commentary about life in laughter.

I turned down some movies that were quite good. mainly on the basis of taste.

I get little kids who recognize me from 'Mary Poppins,' and it just delights me because it's our third generation.

I grew up in Danville, Illinois, right in the middle of the state.

I don't think we've got much of a chance to tell you the truth. But our main problem is our audience skews a little older than most shows, and I don't think our people can stay up that late. I certainly can't.

I never made a good movie.

Somebody asked what I wanted on my gravestone. I'm just going to put: 'Glad I Could Help.'

I never had a lot of drive, but because I had family responsibilities, I had a lot of tenacity - the tenacity of a drowning man.

We should never judge a day by its weather.

In the best of all worlds, the producers would take some responsibility for the kinds of things they're putting out. Unfortunately, they don't.

Today, if you're not an alcoholic, you're nobody.

Some people never change their mind through their whole lives, about anything, despite new information that comes in. And now that we know that homosexuality is not a choice, it's biological, I think we have to love and understand them.

I sing all day. And it's good for you. Good for your vocal cords.

Be careful not to trip over the ottoman.

It means you never know what's going to happen,' I said. 'You do your best, then take your chances. Everything else is beyond our control.

When I started having kids, I thought, 'I don't want to do anything they can't watch.'

My favorite unknown movie is 'The Comic.'

There's a lot of very funny people I'd love to work with that I've never met, of course. I love Steve Martin and Jim Carrey.

I can't work with my brother without laughing.

..why sit on the sidelines of life at any age?

No, I did night clubs right here in Los Angeles. My partner, Phil Erickson, put me in the business, a guy from my home town, a dear friend who we just lost a couple of months ago.

We all need something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for.

My brother and I laughed a lot as kids. We came up in the middle of the Depression, and neither one of us knew we were poor. We had nothing, but we didn't know it.

Everybody knows that I'm shorter, but it doesn't bother me at all.

I've had a lot of writers, in particular, who said they got into writing because of the 'Van Dyke Show.' They said it looked like fun.

I wanted to be able to talk about my work at the dinner table and hold my head up on Sundays when my wife and I led our children into the Brentwood Presbyterian Church, where I was an elder. I did have a wild side, and I showed it every time I walked through the front door and my littlest child, Carrie Beth, made me dance to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass's hit song "Tijuana Sauerkraut.

Emotionally, I'm about 13.

I think most people will tell you that. They can go along and, while they're denying that they are addicted, say it's stress this, it's this, it's that. But I - it's - I think - I really believe there is a gene. Some people become addicted and others don't.

I'm not a loner. I have to have a life partner.

When I auditioned for 'Bye Bye Birdie' on Broadway, Gower Champion said, 'You've got the job!' I said, 'Mr. Champion, I can't dance.' He said, 'We'll teach you what you need to know.'

I went from my mother to my wife. And to this day, I can't bear to be alone.

Rob Petrie is who I really am - in personality and general ineffectiveness.

In my early fifties, I was going through a phase where few things felt right and I was trying to figure out those that did. It was not uncommon. In your twenties, you pursue your dreams. By your late thirties and early forties, you hit a certain stride. Then you hit your fifties, you get your first annoying thoughts of mortality, you begin more serious questioning of not just the meaning of your life but of what's working, what's not working, and what you still want, and all of a sudden you don't know which way is up. You thought you knew but don't. You just want to get to where life feels okay again.

I got into a Broadway show before I ever sang and danced. I learned how after I got in the show.

Everything's getting homogenized. It seems to me like music and behavior and everything else is getting homogenized.