Dick Cavett

“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.”

“I would not ever try to be a show intellectual, which I was accused of doing a while on ABC. I thought you were supposed to read the guests' books.”

“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.”

“Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?”

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

“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.”

“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: Wh...”

“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...”

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

“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...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I love my own coincidences and love to hear other peoples' stories.”

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

“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 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 an...”

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

“I hate Danny Kaye movies.”

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