Quotes from Dick Cavett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.