Garrison Keillor Quotes

We all know you can get AIDS from sex, but did you know that you can get sex from aides?

If the marriage needs help, the answer almost always is have more fun. Drop your list of grievances and go ride a roller coaster.

Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.

I'm a lucky guy. I get to sit around every day and indulge in make believe and get paid for it.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons. ... Republicans: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb, and dangerous.

Sex is not a mechanical act that fails for lack of technique, and it is not a performance by the male for the audience of the female; it is a continuum of attraction that extends from the simplest conversation and the most innocent touching through the act of coitus.

God plays a lot of jokes on us to get our attention.

... life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty.

Forget what you learned about poetry in school. (That it's complex, opaque, a problem to be solved in 1500 words by tomorrow.) Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. It holds the cadence of common life. It has a passion for truth and justice and liberty; it is a buoy to people in ordinary trouble: to a friend whose life has gone skidding into the meridian, who has been struck by bad news, who is frying eggs and hash browns and has whiny child clinging to his pant leg.

I think there's a lot of power in listening to one person talking to you. And this should never be underestimated.One person sitting and talking to you and, you're pulled in, in ways that technology and art and all cannot.

I love rhymes; I love to write a poem about New York and rhyme 'oysters' with 'The Cloisters.' And 'The lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful.' I just feel a sort of small triumph.

Pumpkin pie is a living symbol of mediocrity. The best pumpkin pie you ever ate wasn't all that much different from the worst pumpkin pie you ever ate.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.

This is the big reason most humorists fail. Drunks don't read books.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

You learn this great lesson of life: it's not about me. It's just not. The matter of talent-which seemed so important to you when you were young-is not of great importance. We're simply a conduit. We take things out of the air into us and put them in the form of stories. That's pretty much it.

Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet. . . . Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated.

I'm not busy... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.

My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.

Enough. Man is capable of reform once presented with the facts, and the fact is that bottling water and shipping it is a big waste of fuel, so stop already.

If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?

We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.

Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they're in their own home and nobody's there.

My ability to keep cool in a crisis is based entirely on not knowing all the facts.

I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.

You don't have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you.

You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'

I am a cheerful man, even in the dark, and it's all thanks to a good Lutheran mother. . . . Mother was well composed, a true Lutheran, and taught me to Cheer up, Make yourself useful, Mind your manners, and above all, Don't feel sorry for yourself.

Don't tear up the page and start over again when you write a bad line-try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Writing is a means of discovery, always.

Where I come from, when a Catholic marries a Lutheran it is considered the first step on the road to Minneapolis.

Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.

Sometimes you have to avoid mentioning things because people's feelings are tender.

A man can't eat anger for breakfast and sleep with it at night and not suffer damage to his soul.

We have nearly complete misunderstanding between people of different faiths in Lake Wobegon, and that's probably one reason why we get along so very well. It's when you are trying to convince another person to think the same way that you do that there is friction and trouble between people. But when you feel that the other person is dumber than dirt, too dumb for words - why waste your breath - you get along pretty well. There's no bond between people that's quite so strong as when people each feel slightly superior towards the other one.

I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else. You don't want to be remembered? I don't want them to be told to remember me.

Humor is not a trick, not jokes. Humor is a presence in the world - like grace - and shines on everybody.

For me, the monologue was the favorite thing I had done in radio. It was based on writing, but in the end it was radio, it was standing up and leaning forward into the dark and talking, letting words come out of you.

I was afraid you had deceased,' he said. 'Or gotten engrossed in a long book.

This is Democratic bedrock: we don't let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor's car won't start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one.

When you're old you feast on your memories, and if you spend too much time on exercise, you may get old and not have many.

A person cannot coast along in old destructive habits year after year and accept whatever comes along. A person must stand up on her own two legs and walk. Get off the bus and go get on another. Climb out of the ditch and cross the road. Find the road that s where you want to go. ... The only sermon that counts is the one that is formed by our actions. She would quit drinking and thereby show Kyle life is what you make it. A person can grab hold of her life and change things for the better. This happens all the time. We are not chips of wood drifting down the stream of time. We have oars.

In California virtually everyone has had their teeth whitened. If they all smiled at once, they would give us a headache.

Never insult a writer. You may find yourself immortalized in ways you may not appreciate.

Girls . . . were allowed to play in the house . . . and boys were sent outdoors. . . . Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning how to solve problems through negotiation and roleplaying. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess?

Don't pour the oil directly into my navel, pour it on my sternum and let it run down into my navel, you ignorant peasant.

A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.