Dick Cavett

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.

A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.

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!

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.

It's lamented that the youth get their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It's lamentable that they get more from them than from the news.

I'm not freakishly short. I had, on my show, used shortness as a joke subject; it didn't really bother me.

I love my own coincidences and love to hear other peoples' stories.

Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.

I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.

I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

I haven't ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.

Comedians are sometimes resentful of their writers. Probably because it's hard for giant egos to admit you need anyone but yourself to be what you are.

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn't ailing.

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.

I have a long list of things that make me mad.

Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.

Obviously those who burn to be professional jesters mean that they want to be successful comedians. And those are always an elite, microscopic portion of the population. But oh, how they try.

Coming up through the ranks of any calling can be rough, but that battered soul who survives the early years of courting the comic muse comes close to knowing what only the soldier knows: What combat is like.

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before.

Every comic can report a few 'gift from the gods' moments.

Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.

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.

William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.

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.

It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.

I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.

Commercials are not the only exposure that obesity gets on TV. It is by no means a rarity on the wonderful Judge Judy's show when both plaintiff and accused all but literally fill the screen.

Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.

History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?

Does anything show the complexity of the miraculous brain more than that weird curiosity, the sleep-protection dream?

It's fun for me to go on other folks' talk shows. When you've endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.

The emotions in all true anxiety dreams are next to unbearable.

Anyone working in the media can tell you that there seems to be an always-ready-to-explode segment of the populace for whom offense is a fate worse than anything imaginable. You'd think offense is one of the most calamitous things that could happen to a human being; right up there with the loss of a limb, or just missing a parking space.

In relative youth, we assume we'll remember everything. Someone should urge the young to think otherwise.

There 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.

To call New York's traffic at holiday time a nightmare is to understate.

Home schooling as an idea is on a par with home dentistry.

Teaching is an art and a profession requiring years of training.

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.

Statistically, I'd say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make big money, and although it's not an easy trade - particularly when you're at your galley oar five days a week - it's easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star.

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?'

Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease.

The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

I 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.

A grown man, weeping, is a tough thing to see.