Dick cavett quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!'

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

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!

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?'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.

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.

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.

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.'

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'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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.

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.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

Great humorists are great insulters.

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.

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

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.

I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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?'

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

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

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

It's no fun being a specimen.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.