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 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.
DICK CAVETTRunning 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 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.”
DICK CAVETTIn the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.
DICK CAVETTCan you picture yourself at the age 60 doing what you do now?
DICK CAVETTI’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 CAVETTI don’t think anyone ever gets over the surprise of how differently one audience’s reaction is from another.
DICK CAVETTTeaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training.
DICK CAVETTThe 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.
DICK CAVETTThere 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 CAVETTI 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 CAVETTJust think of all the billions of coincidences that don’t happen.
DICK CAVETTI 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 CAVETTEvery 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.
DICK CAVETTEvery comic can report a few ‘gift from the gods’ moments.
DICK CAVETTYou 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.
DICK CAVETT