206 Quotes by Dick Cavett

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?'

Chris Matthews can't start any sentence without 'Let me ask you this... ' And I love Chris Matthews! But almost everybody in journalism does it. Who's stopping you? Just say it!

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.

It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.

I’ve actually gotten so I don’t associate television with entertainment very much.

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.

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.

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.

It’s no fun being a specimen.