If your parents never had children, chances are... neither will you.
Dick Cavett
If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.
My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew's and Albert Einstein's.
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
To label me an intellectual is a misunderstanding of what that is.
In the main, ghosts are said to be forlorn and generally miserable, if not downright depressed. The jolly ghost is rare.
It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear.
Music bypasses the brain and goes straight to the heart. I wish my life had more of it.
Censorship feeds the dirty mind more than the four-letter word itself.
I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.
Japanese is sort of a hobby of mine, and I can get around Japan with ease.
Perhaps the saddest irony of depression is that suicide happens when the patient gets a little better and can again function sufficiently.
William F. Buckley was a man who had a great capacity for fun and for amusing himself by amazing others.
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.
Depression - it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven't been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it's truly different.
All three of my parents - I also had a stepmother - were teachers, and my dad taught high school, and as he always reminded me when I was going to spend some money on something, 'Your mother and I, in the Depression, had to decide whether to spend a dime on a loaf of bread or if we could go to a movie with it.'
I haven't ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.
Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.
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.
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?'
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.
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.
The sudden death at 51 of James Gandolfini is intolerable.
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.
Why are people afraid of ghosts? 'Ooh, no, I wouldn't want to see one! I'd be too scared' - accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice - is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I'd think anyone would welcome he opportunity. I've never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.
The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.
I have a disturbing problem with losing things. My vulnerability to loss-distress could properly be labeled not only inordinate, but neurotic.
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.
The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, 'You saved my dad's life.'
A conversation does not have to be scintillating in order to be memorable. I once met a president of the United States, and his second sentence to me was about knees.
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 takes a certain amount of guts to go to your class reunions.
To call New York's traffic at holiday time a nightmare is to understate.
I have never been converted to or even had much interest in spiritualism, occultism, Swedenborgianism or any particular religion. And I never, except occasionally for a laugh, visit the quacks who call themselves psychics.
I have a feeling that about 90% of my life has been shaped by my voice, both as an embarrassment and as an advantage. There was always the terrible incongruity of this deep voice barreling out of this little body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that it was ludicrous, that it took on an importance that wasn't really there.
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
My dream was maybe someday, one night I can be a guest on a talk show, and then I will have achieved everything I want.
I'm not freakishly short. I had, on my show, used shortness as a joke subject; it didn't really bother me.
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.
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.
I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.
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.
Nobody is going to try to confiscate guns, although some Web sites know better: President Obama, they are certain, wants to.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy.
Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.
A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.
