Top 100 Dick Cavett Quotes
#1. It's not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.
Dick Cavett
#2. I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.
Dick Cavett
#3. 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.
Dick Cavett
#5. As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
Dick Cavett
#6. A grown man, weeping, is a tough thing to see.
Dick Cavett
#7. Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.
Dick Cavett
#8. Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?
Dick Cavett
#9. To call New York's traffic at holiday time a nightmare is to understate.
Dick Cavett
#10. I always wanted to live in a haunted house.
Dick Cavett
#11. Lawyers work hard and, like us, they're human, many of them.
Dick Cavett
#12. An effective speaker can do more damage or more good in a well-stated minute than an angry klutz could do in half an hour.
Dick Cavett
#13. In relative youth, we assume we'll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.
Dick Cavett
#14. It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.
Dick Cavett
#15. 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.
Dick Cavett
#16. It's a tribute to the human brain that anyone is able to function out there on television in a talk situation that is entirely artificial.
Dick Cavett
#17. Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training.
Dick Cavett
#18. I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.
Dick Cavett
#19. I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.
Dick Cavett
#20. 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.'
Dick Cavett
#21. Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?
Dick Cavett
#22. I feel like I've been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.
Dick Cavett
#23. 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.
Dick Cavett
#24. Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.
Dick Cavett
#25. Greatly talented performers don't know - often spectacularly - what's best for them, don't know what their talents really are, and don't know what's just plain wrong for them.
Dick Cavett
#26. I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before.
Dick Cavett
#27. The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.
Dick Cavett
#28. There were several things a Yale freshman was supposed to be able to do. You had to demonstrate in the Olympic-size Yale pool that you could swim 50 yards or be inducted into swimming class.
Dick Cavett
#29. 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.
Dick Cavett
#30. 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?'
Dick Cavett
#31. I know what it feels like to be a gun lover.
Dick Cavett
#32. Every comic can report a few 'gift from the gods' moments.
Dick Cavett
#33. Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.
Dick Cavett
#34. To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.
Dick Cavett
#35. I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.
Dick Cavett
#36. Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.
Dick Cavett
#37. I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.
Dick Cavett
#38. 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.
Dick Cavett
#39. Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?
Dick Cavett
#40. 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.
Dick Cavett
#41. I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.
Dick Cavett
#42. 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.
Dick Cavett
#43. 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.
Dick Cavett
#44. 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.
Dick Cavett
#45. Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease.
Dick Cavett
#46. 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.
Dick Cavett
#47. 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.
Dick Cavett
#48. 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.
Dick Cavett
#49. Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it's painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it's extremely painful.
Dick Cavett
#50. I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.
Dick Cavett
#51. I've actually gotten so I don't associate television with entertainment very much.
Dick Cavett
#52. 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.
Dick Cavett
#53. 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.
Dick Cavett
#54. It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.
Dick Cavett
#55. When I was a kid in Nebraska, a cantankerous farmer, known for plinking with his '22 at passing cars in which he perceived enemies, ingeniously rigged up a shotgun in his house, trained on the inside of his front door so as to widely distribute any intruder.
Dick Cavett
#56. The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that's long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.
Dick Cavett
#57. My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew's and Albert Einstein's.
Dick Cavett
#58. William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.
Dick Cavett
#59. 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.
Dick Cavett
#60. Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.
Dick Cavett
#61. The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable.
Dick Cavett
#62. I eat at this German-Chinese restaurant and the food is delicious. The only problem is that an hour later you're hungry for power.
Dick Cavett
#63. I haven't ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.
Dick Cavett
#65. Chris Matthews can't start any sentence without 'Let me ask you this ... ' And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who's stopping you? Just say it!
Dick Cavett
#66. 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.
Dick Cavett
#67. If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.
Dick Cavett
#68. There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
Dick Cavett
#69. 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.
Dick Cavett
#70. Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.
Dick Cavett
#71. 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.
Dick Cavett
#72. 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.
Dick Cavett
#73. I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.
Dick Cavett
#74. 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.
Dick Cavett
#75. 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.
Dick Cavett
#76. I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.
Dick Cavett
#77. I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.
Dick Cavett
#78. Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.
Dick Cavett
#79. Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn't ailing.
Dick Cavett
#80. My dream was maybe someday, one night I can be a guest on a talk show, and then I will have achieved everything I want.
Dick Cavett
#81. I have a long list of things that make me mad.
Dick Cavett
#82. 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!
Dick Cavett
#83. The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.
Dick Cavett
#84. Depression - it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven't been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it's truly different.
Dick Cavett
#85. 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.
Dick Cavett
#86. 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.
Dick Cavett
#87. Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.
Dick Cavett
#88. Comedians are sometimes resentful of their writers. Probably because it's hard for giant egos to admit you need anyone but yourself to be what you are.
Dick Cavett
#89. I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.
Dick Cavett
#90. I live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.
Dick Cavett
#91. The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.
Dick Cavett
#92. Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.
Dick Cavett
#93. Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.
Dick Cavett
#94. I love my own coincidences and love to hear other peoples' stories.
Dick Cavett
#95. 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.
Dick Cavett
#96. 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.
Dick Cavett
#97. A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.
Dick Cavett
#98. 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.
Dick Cavett
#99. You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.
Dick Cavett
#100. Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.
Dick Cavett
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