Quotes from Dick Cavett

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.

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

While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.

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!

I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.

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.

It's lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It's lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

It's no fun being a specimen.

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn't include someone the size of the Hindenburg.

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

A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.

I confess, I do have to remind myself almost daily that there are people on this earth capable of reading, writing, eating and dressing themselves who believe their lives are ruled from billions of miles away, by the stars - and, of course, the planets.

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.

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

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

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

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.