Dick Cavett quotes:

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?

If I were running a campaign, I'd urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely - on a talented young comedy writer.

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.

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.

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.

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 about his own films' failure - once again - to be honored.

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

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

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

All three of my parents - I also had a stepmother - were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, 'Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.'

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.

I have a feeling that about 90% of my life has been shaped by my voice, both as an embarrassment and as an advantage. There was always the terrible incongruity of this deep voice barreling out of this little body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that it was ludicrous, that it took on an importance that wasn't really there.

It's fun for me to go on other folks' talk shows. When you've endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.

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.

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.

I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.

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.

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn't ailing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 galley oar five days a week - it's easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star.

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.'

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

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.

Every comic can report a few 'gift from the gods' moments.

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

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

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.

I always wanted to live in a haunted house.

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

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.

Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.

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

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.

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.

It's no fun being a specimen.

I've actually gotten so I don't associate television with entertainment very much.

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

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.

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!'

It's not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

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.

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.'

There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?

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

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

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

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

Obviously those who burn to be professional jesters mean that they want to be successful comedians . And those are always an elite, microscopic portion of the population . But oh, how they try.

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

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?'

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.

Great humorists are great insulters.

I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.

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

Comedians are sometimes resentful of their writers. Probably because it's hard for giant egos to admit you need anyone but yourself to be what you are.

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'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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.

Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.

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

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.

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.

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 people who handle it know what they are doing.

I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.

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

You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.

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

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

I'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.

It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.

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.

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

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

If your parents never had children, chances are... neither will you.

I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.

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!

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.

Why are sex and violence always linked? I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex."

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.

The idea that hunting is one against one is ludicrous. It's one animal versus the hunter, the manufacturer of the rifle, the bullet maker, the designer and manufacturer of the telescopic sight, the auto manufacturer who made the car the hunter got to the edge of the wild in, the maker of his waterproof shoes, the various manufacturers of his mittens, glasses, overcoat - and that's only the beginning of the list. The "sportsman" who shoots an animal should then make a speech, like the actor who wins an Oscar does, thanking the multitudes behind the scenes who made this "victory" possible.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.

Meryl Streep belongs on anybodys list of greats.

I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex.

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

The Nixon administration kept a nasty eye on our show... Cops would come by - often just in time to see the act they wanted to see.