Top 100 Dick Van Dyke Quotes
#1. He wanted the show to be fresh to audiences 50 years down the line.
Dick Van Dyke
#2. 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.'
Dick Van Dyke
#3. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#4. I don't play golf. I have more fun singing and dancing.
Dick Van Dyke
#5. I think, the 'Van Dyke Show' and 'Mary Poppins' are two of the best periods of my life. I had so much fun, I didn't want it to end.
Dick Van Dyke
#6. I've always been a bit of an orphan, because actors say, 'Well, he's more of a dancer.' And dancers say, 'No. He's really a singer.' And singers say, 'No. He's an actor.'
Dick Van Dyke
#7. I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.'
Dick Van Dyke
#8. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#9. Jon Stewart kills me. I love him. And Bill Maher. He does an hour on HBO. But entirely political. It is awfully rough, but he does make me laugh.
Dick Van Dyke
#10. 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was the most fun I ever had and the most creative period of my life.
Dick Van Dyke
#11. In my seventies, I exercised to stay ambulatory. In my eighties, I exercise to avoid assisted living.
Dick Van Dyke
#12. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#13. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#14. Rob Petrie is who I really am - in personality and general ineffectiveness.
Dick Van Dyke
#15. All of us involved say 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was the best five years of our lives. We were like otters at play.
Dick Van Dyke
#16. I can't work with my brother without laughing.
Dick Van Dyke
#17. I've made peace with insecurity ... because there is no security of any kind.
Dick Van Dyke
#18. Women will never be as successful as men because they have no wives to advise them.
Dick Van Dyke
#19. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#21. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#22. I did a 'Golden Girls' once, which shot in front of an audience, and that went well. I had a good time. But I need an audience, for comedy at least.
Dick Van Dyke
#23. I went from my mother to my wife. And to this day, I can't bear to be alone.
Dick Van Dyke
#24. Put me on solid ground and I'll start tapping! At my age they say to keep moving.
Dick Van Dyke
#25. [My mother] once cooked a ham and later found it in my father's shirt drawer. I am not kidding.
Dick Van Dyke
#26. Stan said he used to keep Hardy late, make him miss his golf game, and really get him mad.
Dick Van Dyke
#27. I married somebody half my age, and everybody thought I was crazy, but she is just an absolute angel.
Dick Van Dyke
#28. ..why sit on the sidelines of life at any age?
Dick Van Dyke
#29. I watch 'Al Jazeera.' They have news that you can't find anywhere else. They do great documentaries, too.
Dick Van Dyke
#30. I'm always announcing my retirement. I'm still not retired.
Dick Van Dyke
#31. I never wanted to be an actor, and to this day I don't. I can't get a handle on it. An actor wants to become someone else. I am a song-and-dance man, and I enjoy being myself, which is all I can do.
Dick Van Dyke
#32. The most important thing for old guys is never start going down the stairs sideways.
Dick Van Dyke
#33. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#34. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#35. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#36. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#38. Julie's voice could have been used to tune a piano. She was pitch perfect - and I never was. I was enjoyably close.
Dick Van Dyke
#39. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#41. I was the worst game show host that ever lived, and I knew it.
Dick Van Dyke
#42. Walt Disney and I always said we were two children looking for our inner adults.
Dick Van Dyke
#43. The best writers were philosophers who wrapped their commentary about life in laughter.
Dick Van Dyke
#44. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#45. Something greater than me was happening. And yet, it was happening to me.
Dick Van Dyke
#46. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#47. In general, things either work out or they don't, and if they don't, you figure out something else, a plan B. There's nothing wrong with plan B. Most
Dick Van Dyke
#49. I didn't know the answers, but I could feel that the things that gave life meaning came from a place within and from the nurturing of values like tolerance, charity, and community.
Dick Van Dyke
#50. My son Barry, of course, has been on from the beginning. And his son Shane is playing now a med student regularly on the show. And at one point or another, I've had all four of his kids on the show.
Dick Van Dyke
#51. I worked nightclubs all through my 20s, and I was a teetotaler.
Dick Van Dyke
#52. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#53. 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.'
Dick Van Dyke
#54. But once we got on the air, everybody except Morey Amsterdam pretty much stuck to the script.
Dick Van Dyke
#57. The show became its own little world, with its own internal rhythm and high standards.
Dick Van Dyke
#58. People think I'm talking like I'm in perfect health, but I have all the infirmities for my age. I have arthritis and all those things. But if you keep moving, that won't bother you.
Dick Van Dyke
#59. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#60. Everybody knows that I'm shorter, but it doesn't bother me at all.
Dick Van Dyke
#62. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#64. I played a killer twice. Once on 'Matlock,' on Andy Griffith's show, I got to play the killer.
Dick Van Dyke
#65. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#66. Oh, well, my first love is comedy or singing and dancing.
Dick Van Dyke
#67. You know, I'm almost out of the habit of watching episodic television now.
Dick Van Dyke
#68. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#69. I sing all day. And it's good for you. Good for your vocal cords.
Dick Van Dyke
#70. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#71. 'Mary Poppins' was one of the best experiences of my life.
Dick Van Dyke
#72. The secret to keeping moving is keeping moving.
Dick Van Dyke
#73. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#74. I found out retirement means playing golf, or I don't know what the hell it means. But to me, retirement means doing what you have fun doing.
Dick Van Dyke
#75. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#77. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#78. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#79. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#80. Somebody asked what I wanted on my gravestone. I'm just going to put: 'Glad I Could Help.'
Dick Van Dyke
#81. You can spread jelly on the peanut butter but you can't spread peanut butter on the jelly.
Dick Van Dyke
#82. Today, if you're not an alcoholic, you're nobody.
Dick Van Dyke
#83. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#84. I have four children and I have seven grandkids.
Dick Van Dyke
#85. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#86. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#87. Life is like a box of chocolates, I'm a nerd and I read books
Dick Van Dyke
#88. As wonderful as they were, my parents didn't teach me anything about self-discipline, concentration, patience, or focus. If I hadn't had a family myself, I probably never would've done anything. Marriage taught me responsibility.
Dick Van Dyke
#89. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#90. I was lucky to get the kinds of parts I wanted. I always said I didn't want to do anything my kids can't see.
Dick Van Dyke
#91. I got into a Broadway show before I ever sang and danced. I learned how after I got in the show.
Dick Van Dyke
#92. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#93. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#94. I taught Sunday school when I was younger, and ended up an elder in the church, and it just seemed to me that a lot of people who went to church certainly weren't - the rest of the week - living what I would call an Christian life.
Dick Van Dyke
#95. Do you know that I was the anchor on the 'CBS Morning Show?' And my newsman was Walter Cronkite.
Dick Van Dyke
#96. There are tribes all over the world who sing and dance every day as part of their lives. And we oughta do that.
Dick Van Dyke
#97. So I think we're kind of an alternate choice for people who have had it with sex and violence.
Dick Van Dyke
#98. Bob Hope, like Mark Twain, had a sense of humor that was uniquely American, and like Twain, we'll likely not see another like him.
Dick Van Dyke
#99. 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.
Dick Van Dyke
#100. I found myself thinking about what worked for me, and also what I wanted to do for work, what was important to me, and what I wanted my work to say about me.
Dick Van Dyke
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