Dick Cavett Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Its fun for me to go on other folks talk shows. When youve endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

It's no fun being a specimen.

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 think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

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.

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.

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.

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?'

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

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.

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.

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

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

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

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