Dick Cavett Quotes

If your parents never had children, chances are... neither will you.

It's no fun being a specimen.

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

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.

It's not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

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.

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.

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

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

Lawyers work hard and, like us, they're human, many of them.

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

Great humorists are great insulters.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.

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

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!

Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?

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

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

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

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

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

Statistically, I'd say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make big money, and although it's not an easy trade - particularly when you're at your galley oar five days a week - it's easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star.

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

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

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

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.

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?'

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!

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.

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.

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!'

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.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

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.

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