Quotes from Dick Cavett

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!'

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?'

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.'

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.

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."

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

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

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

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

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

I think I have many spenglerian moods about the country, and that some day people will look back and think 'this was a really goofy, unadmirable stupid time.

Bush's "the French have no word for entrepreneur" is guaranteed immortality.

What better substitute for real love than a sea of eager faces, beaming, laughing, applauding, and celebrating your existence?

The initial delight of being spotted lasts about a week and four days.

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

I had Wayne as a guest on the show once. He may not remember, because I'm not sure he ever saw me. His eyes and consciousness seem to bypass you somehow, and focus somewhere in an undefined middle distance. The words sound memorized; he has an affect that might best be described as "nobody home.

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn't ailing.

I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.

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

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.

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.

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 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 feel like I've been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.