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 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.
More Dick Cavett Quotes
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The information superhighway? That sounds like a place that’s long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year.
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I’ll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.
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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.
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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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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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I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.
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I’ve actually gotten so I don’t associate television with entertainment very much.
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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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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.
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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!’
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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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Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?
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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!
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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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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.
DICK CAVETT