Quotes from Dick Van Dyke

When I started having kids, I thought, 'I don't want to do anything they can't watch.'

I've been talking about retiring for years. It's my standard answer to the question, 'What are your future plans?' The truth is, I'll always want to do things that are worthwhile or fun.

A lot of violence, a lot of gore in it, and I just didn't want to do that kind of thing.

I grew up in Danville, Illinois, right in the middle of the state.

I don't have any children; I have four middle-aged people.

The thing I'm most proud of is my family, the way they've turned out.

I turned down some movies that were quite good. mainly on the basis of taste.

Here's the truth. Your teens and twenties are your Plan A. At 50, you're assessing whether Plan B or Plan C or any of the other plans you hatched actually worked. Your sixties and seventies, they're an improvisation.

I played a killer twice. Once on 'Matlock,' on Andy Griffith's show, I got to play the killer.

Do you know that I was the anchor on the 'CBS Morning Show?' And my newsman was Walter Cronkite.

The first time I met Mary Tyler Moore, I thought she was just beautiful, but I thought she was a little young.

A lot of actors seem to dislike typecasting these days. The funny thing is, that's a fairly recent development. It used to be that actors wanted to be typecast so audiences could remember them and identify with them.

I never had a lot of drive, but because I had family responsibilities, I had a lot of tenacity - the tenacity of a drowning man.

But I wish they would make a musical of some kind. I miss musicals so much. You don't see them anymore.

I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that's literally 70 years.

When I get some budding young comic who'll come up to me and say, 'What was it like to do it in those days?' I try to be as gracious to him as Stan Laurel was to me.

I'm a very neat person.

My brother and I laughed a lot as kids. We came up in the middle of the Depression, and neither one of us knew we were poor. We had nothing, but we didn't know it.

I watch 'Al Jazeera.' They have news that you can't find anywhere else. They do great documentaries, too.

I worked nightclubs all through my 20s, and I was a teetotaler.

Unfortunately, the spouses of performers have a terrible, terrible life. They get shunted aside, pushed aside, ignored.

My favorite unknown movie is 'The Comic.'

They did ask me to do 'Dancing With The Stars;' I said I can do one show, but on that show you have to come up with a new number every week, and I told them that I think I'm a little past that stage.

When I was a kid, I had ambitions for being a television announcer, which was before television took off, you know, in the late '40s. And just through necessity, going out looking for work, I was starting to sing, and dance, and act, and I never expected to do that, nor to have any success at it at least.