Top 100 Dick Cavett Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

54. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

57. “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

58. “It’s no fun being a specimen.”

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

60. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

69. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

71. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

74. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

90. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

92. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

94. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

96. “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

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

— Dick Cavett

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

— Dick Cavett

99. “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

100. “It’s a tribute to the human brain that anyone is able to function out there on television in a talk situation that is entirely artificial.”

— Dick Cavett