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 CAVETTThe 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.
More Dick Cavett Quotes
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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.
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The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable.
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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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Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.
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I’ve actually gotten so I don’t associate television with entertainment very much.
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I like when the ice gets thin, the going gets rough, the guests get edgy.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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.”
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As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
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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.
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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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Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.
DICK CAVETT