Dick Cavett Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

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

Dick Cavett
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.

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

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

Dick Cavett
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.

Dick Cavett
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.

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

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

Dick Cavett
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.

Dick Cavett
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.

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

Dick Cavett
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.

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

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

Dick Cavett
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.

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

Dick Cavett
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?'

Dick Cavett
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.

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

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

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

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

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

Dick Cavett
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.

Dick Cavett
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.

Dick Cavett
An inherited nasty temper has only flared on the air a few times, but much more frequently in "real life". So far I have managed to escape having my salient features re-arranged.

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

Dick Cavett
Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine.

Dick Cavett
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.

Dick Cavett
It's a wonderful job for people who have never had a nervous breakdown but always wanted one.

Dick Cavett