Top 100 Dick Cavett Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

54. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

55. “Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.”

— Dick Cavett

56. “The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable.”

— Dick Cavett

57. “I have a long list of things that make me mad.”

— Dick Cavett

58. “I’m sure I’ve all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer’s ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor.”

— Dick Cavett

59. “It’s no fun being a specimen.”

— Dick Cavett

60. “I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.”

— Dick Cavett

61. “I’m not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.”

— Dick Cavett

62. “To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.”

— Dick Cavett

63. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

65. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

67. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

68. “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!’”

— Dick Cavett

69. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

70. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

71. “Lawyers work hard and, like us, they’re human, many of them.”

— Dick Cavett

72. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

74. “Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.”

— Dick Cavett

75. “I’ll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.”

— Dick Cavett

76. “The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that’s long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

78. “I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty – and evaporating quickly.”

— Dick Cavett

79. “Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.”

— Dick Cavett

80. “You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you’re stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, ‘Hey, you’re great! What’s your name again?’”

— Dick Cavett

81. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

82. “I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.”

— Dick Cavett

83. “I’m not freakishly short. I had, on my show, used shortness as a joke subject; it didn’t really bother me.”

— Dick Cavett

84. “Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve.”

— Dick Cavett

85. “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.”

— Dick Cavett

86. “Meryl Streep belongs on anybodys list of greats.”

— Dick Cavett

87. “Running my show is really like an actor being in repertory but where, in one day in one performance, you do scenes from a drama, a farce, a low comedy and a tragedy.”

— Dick Cavett

88. “Every time someone says, ‘You know, we really ought to get together,’ if I were really honest, I would ask ‘Why?’”

— Dick Cavett

89. “I’m not all that enthralled by show business, and I’m not that much of a highbrow.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

91. “In relative youth, we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.”

— Dick Cavett

92. “I’m the only talk show host, I think, if there’s such a category in, what’s called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.”

— Dick Cavett

93. “Every comic can report a few ‘gift from the gods’ moments.”

— Dick Cavett

94. “I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-’60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn’t the night before.”

— Dick Cavett

95. “There were several things a Yale freshman was supposed to be able to do. You had to demonstrate in the Olympic-size Yale pool that you could swim 50 yards or be inducted into swimming class.”

— Dick Cavett

96. “Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.”

— Dick Cavett

97. “Its fun for me to go on other folks talk shows. When youve endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.”

— Dick Cavett

98. “History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

100. “There should be three days a week when no one is allowed to say: ‘What’s your sign?’ Violators would have their copies of Kahlil Gibran confiscated.”

— Dick Cavett