I haven't ever found any great writing on that wonderful and often unappreciated art form, the insult.
— Dick Cavett
I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.
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.
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?'
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'm not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.
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 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.
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 think we live in an age of increasing mediocrity.
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.
Every time someone says, 'You know, we really ought to get together,' if I were really honest, I would ask 'Why?'
By the time I was in the fourth grade, I sounded exactly like my father on the phone.
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.'
I get a kick out of people saying I was funny.
You would have to be naive to think you can appear on television and not have the material edited in some way.
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.
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 love my own coincidences and love to hear other peoples' stories.
I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.
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!
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 had to fight the intellectual label when I started in television, because, first of all, it's not going to help you commercially, and also, it wasn't particularly true of me. I mean, if anybody thought I was an intellectual, they probably had never really seen one.
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 live a sensible life. You know, I don't take on too much.
I've actually gotten so I don't associate television with entertainment very much.
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'm not all that enthralled by show business, and I'm not that much of a highbrow.
My IQ is somewhere between Spiro Agnew's and Albert Einstein's.
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.
I hate Danny Kaye movies.
I don't feel old. I feel like a young man that has something wrong with him.
Great humorists are great insulters.
Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the people who handle it know what they are doing.
I felt bad when George Bush was booed. But only briefly. My sympathy for that man has a half-life of about four seconds.
I'm not freakishly short. I had, on my show, used shortness as a joke subject; it didn't really bother me.
Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.
A biggest mistake I made when I started doing a talk show was I thought you had to read the books.
If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.
I'm the only talk show host, I think, if there's such a category in, what's called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.
While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.
Therapists need to give a depressed patient support and direction.
Meryl Streep belongs on anybody's list of greats.
Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.
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.
It's no fun being a specimen.
It's not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.
I'll be happy if I can just stay out of Nebraska.
I feel like I've been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.
If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.
