Dick Cavett Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.

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

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.

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

Why are sex and violence always linked? I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."

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

Great humorists are great insulters.

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.

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.

Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I have a long list of things that make me mad.

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

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.

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

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.

Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it's painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it's extremely painful.

I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn't include someone the size of the Hindenburg.

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

If (O.J. Simpson) is acquitted, I will renounce my citizenship. And if I converse with him at a cocktail party, I will say, 'Well, there are so many people here who haven't murdered anyone. I think I'll go talk to them.' I'll also riot.

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 always wanted to live in a haunted house.

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.