Top 77 Dick Cavett Quotes

Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.

The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, ‘You saved my dad’s life.’

I’ve actually gotten so I don’t associate television with entertainment very much.

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.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

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.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the people who handle it know what they are doing.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Every time someone says, ‘You know, we really ought to get together,’ if I were really honest, I would ask ‘Why?’

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.

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.

Great humorists are great insulters.

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

I haven’t ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

All three of my parents – I also had a stepmother – were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, ‘Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.’

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

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody’s list of greats.

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

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?’

Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice.

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

Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.

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.

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

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

You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you’re stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, ‘Hey, you’re great! What’s your name again?’

A grown man, weeping, is a tough thing to see.

It’s no fun being a specimen.

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

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 find most ‘sacred music’ pretty dismal.

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

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.

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.

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

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

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 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.’

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.

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.

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.

Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.

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

I don’t feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.

When I’m doing an appearance somewhere and taking questions from the audience, I can always count on: ‘Tell about the guy who died on your show!’

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

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

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

I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.

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 hate Danny Kaye movies.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

I feel like I’ve been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.

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