Dick Cavett Quotes

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

I don't consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

I suppose the common idea of me is that I'm going to be someone who's hyper and cracking jokes all the time, but people who meet me are soon disabused of that notion.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

I wanted people to see me, to change their minds about me.

I knew Henry Fonda was my father, but I didn't know who I was. They all thought of me as Henry Fonda's son. Unfortunately for them, they never got to know me.

I just feel as though it's become a situation where people have manifested this caricature of who I am, and they act as if there's no real person inside of it.

People want me to be funny all the time. They think I'm being funny no matter what I say or do and that's not the case.

It's funny: people who meet me say, 'I thought you'd be different.' But I'm still the same guy.

Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.

I had been an academic all my life. As academics, you tend to believe the smartest people are in academia.

One character mistook me for the model and remarked 'That Man-Tan sure works wonders!' That ain't Man-Tan. I'm tan, man. From my head to my toes.

I did a radio interview; the DJ's first question was "Who are you?" I had to think. Is this guy really deep, or did I drive to the wrong station?

I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Everytime somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg".

I am not a witch. I'm nothing you've heard. I'm you.

Little girl, he called me. A little girl who is stressed out to the point of paranoia. That is not me, but now, it's who the Candor think I am.

I'm not what you call your basic intellectual.

If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

I've seen it over the years, the more intellectual they are, the more work they don't want to do. You have to do both, you have to be able to put in the graft.

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.

The term "intellectual" is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility.

I went to a heavy metal concert. The singer yelled out, "How many of you people feel like human beings tonight?" And then he said, "How many of you feel like animals?" The thing is, everyone cheered after the animals part, but I cheered after the human beings part because I did not know there was a second part to the question.

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.

...and yet I am what they think I am.