Top 135 Quotes & Sayings by Dick Cavett

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

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.

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

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 your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

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

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

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

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.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

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!

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

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

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!

It's no fun being a specimen.

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?'

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

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.

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

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

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

Why are people afraid of ghosts? 'Ooh, no, I wouldn't want to see one! I'd be too scared' - accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice - is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I'd think anyone would welcome he opportunity. I've never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.

Great humorists are great insulters.