Daily Inspiration Quote by Dick Van Dyke

That little shrug of a sentence is doing a lot of reputation management. Van Dyke isn’t saying he passed on “bad” movies; he’s saying he passed on good ones. The flex is subtle: he positions himself as someone whose career wasn’t built on desperation or obvious calculation, but on an internal compass. “Quite good” acknowledges craft and prestige, then “mainly on the basis of taste” yanks the conversation away from box office logic and into something more intimate and hard to argue with. Taste isn’t a metric you can litigate. It’s personal authority dressed as modesty.

The lowercase, almost offhand delivery matters. It reads like a man allergic to self-mythology, which is itself a kind of mythology. Van Dyke came up in an era when movie stardom was supposed to be both aspirational and strategic, and when TV actors were often treated as second-class citizens. By framing his refusals as “taste,” he’s also defending the legitimacy of a career that leaned heavily into television’s homespun warmth and musical-comedy elasticity. He didn’t just “choose TV”; he curated a tone.

Subtext: a quiet insistence that being beloved is not the same as being indiscriminate. Taste becomes a moral aesthetic, a boundary against roles that might have been respectable on paper but wrong for the persona audiences trusted. It’s a reminder that longevity often comes from turning down the “good” thing that doesn’t sound like you.