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 CAVETTWhy 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.”
More Dick Cavett Quotes
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A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.
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In relative youth, we assume we’ll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.
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Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.
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Can you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?’
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Meryl Streep belongs on anybody’s list of greats.
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The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they’d word something or how they’d inflect it.
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Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.
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You can, after all, reduce the reasons for watching TV to but two: to be lulled, and to be stimulated. Some people do one sometimes, the other sometimes. Some people do all of one or all of the other.
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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.
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If your parents never had children, chances are neither will you.
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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.
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