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 CAVETTGreatly 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.
More Dick Cavett Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
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 -
It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.
DICK CAVETT -
Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.
DICK CAVETT -
Great humorists are great insulters.
DICK CAVETT -
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 -
The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that’s long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.
DICK CAVETT -
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 -
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 -
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.”
DICK CAVETT -
Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.
DICK CAVETT -
Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.
DICK CAVETT -
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 -
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.
DICK CAVETT






