Dick Cavett
20 quotes
Biography
"I'm sure I've all but lost friends by maintaining that, despite their love for it, I always saw Stanley Kramer's 'It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' as more of an exercise in anti-comedy than humor."
"I don't think you could say now that ABC is crasser than the other two networks. But as long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it. It becomes an ever-descending spiral."
"It's a wonderful job for people who have never had a nervous breakdown but always wanted one."
"Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine."
"It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear."
"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."
"I think I have many spenglerian moods about the country, and that some day people will look back and think 'this was a really goofy, unadmirable stupid time."
"If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either."
"The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable."
"I think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity."
"I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds."
"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."
"The very phrase 'Oscar night' used to accelerate my pulse. For one thing - dating myself - it meant Bob Hope. He always had good, strong jokes, that faultless delivery, and always a new joke about his own films' failure - once again - to be honored."
"William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others."
"If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either."
"Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing."
"I get a kick out of people saying I was funny."
"To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is."
"When I was a kid in Nebraska, a cantankerous farmer, known for plinking with his '22 at passing cars in which he perceived enemies, ingeniously rigged up a shotgun in his house, trained on the inside of his front door so as to widely distribute any intruder."
"Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there's not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve."