Dick Cavett Quotes

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.'

The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that's long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.

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.

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.

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.

The idea that hunting is one against one is ludicrous. It's one animal versus the hunter, the manufacturer of the rifle, the bullet maker, the designer and manufacturer of the telescopic sight, the auto manufacturer who made the car the hunter got to the edge of the wild in, the maker of his waterproof shoes, the various manufacturers of his mittens, glasses, overcoat - and that's only the beginning of the list. The "sportsman" who shoots an animal should then make a speech, like the actor who wins an Oscar does, thanking the multitudes behind the scenes who made this "victory" possible.

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

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.

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

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

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

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

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

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.

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

Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.

To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.

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.

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.

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.

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.

I have a feeling that about 90% of my life has been shaped by my voice, both as an embarrassment and as an advantage. There was always the terrible incongruity of this deep voice barreling out of this little body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that it was ludicrous, that it took on an importance that wasn't really there.

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

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

I don't think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience's reaction is from another.

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

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.

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.

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

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

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.

It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.

I'm the only talk show host, I think, if there's such a category in, what's called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

In the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.

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.

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.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.

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.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.