Top 100 Dick Cavett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

3. “I don’t feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

6. “Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.”

— Dick Cavett

7. “It takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.”

— Dick Cavett

8. “By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.”

— Dick Cavett

9. “An effective speaker can do more damage or more good in a well-stated minute than an angry klutz could do in half an hour.”

— Dick Cavett

10. “I find most ‘sacred music’ pretty dismal.”

— Dick Cavett

11. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

12. “I eat at this German-Chinese restaurant and the food is delicious. The only problem is that an hour later you’re hungry for power.”

— Dick Cavett

13. “My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew’s and Albert Einstein’s.”

— Dick Cavett

14. “If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.”

— Dick Cavett

15. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

16. “I live a sensible life. You know, I don’t take on too much.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

18. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

Featured in: Fun Quotes

20. “I hate Danny Kaye movies.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

24. “The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, ‘You saved my dad’s life.’”

— Dick Cavett

25. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

26. “Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?”

— Dick Cavett

27. “Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don’t happen.”

— Dick Cavett

28. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

29. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

30. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

31. “Great humorists are great insulters.”

— Dick Cavett

32. “I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

34. “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.’”

— Dick Cavett

35. “Bush’s “the French have no word for entrepreneur” is guaranteed immortality.”

— Dick Cavett

36. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

38. “Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy’s show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.”

— Dick Cavett

39. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

Featured in: Strong Quotes

40. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

41. “It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer’s life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.”

— Dick Cavett

42. “I always wanted to live in a haunted house.”

— Dick Cavett

43. “There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?”

— Dick Cavett

44. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

45. “To call New York’s traffic at holiday time a nightmare is to understate.”

— Dick Cavett

46. “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!”

— Dick Cavett

47. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

48. “Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.”

— Dick Cavett

49. “It’s not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett