Garrison Keillor Quotes

We English majors...need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror. How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one...Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense?

TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle

The greatness of America is that it produces exuberant geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire and Leonard Bernstein. We are meant to be a jazzy people who talk big and jump on the table and dance; we aren't supposed to be dopey and glum and brood over old injuries.

... I never was one to get upset about a few scratches on a motor vehicle, it is meant to be used, not saved.

A compassionate conservative is someone who electrocutes juveniles but lets them have a last 'make a wish'.

Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn't funny. It's a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it's not a surprise anymore.

The French have a new president, the British will soon have a new P.M., and we envy them as we endure the endless wait for this small dim man to go back to Texas and resume his life.

To Norwegians, the polka is a form of martial art.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

I think if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world for all of us.

Winter: It's not just a season, it's who we are.

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.

I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain't necessarily so. The swift stand a better chance if they are also beautiful.

... and people are to march around the church to commemorate the event, Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem and was greeted with applause and with palms. People thought he had come to overthrow the Romans, but ... no ... he had come to change THEM ... and that led to things turning bad.

Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

We carry adolescence around in our bodies all our lives. We get through the Car Crash Age alive and cruise through our early twenties as cool dudes, wily, dashing, winsome . . . shooting baskets, the breeze, the moon, and then we try to become caring men, good husbands, great fathers, good citizens.

The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.

We thank you [the soldiers recently returned from the middle east] for your service.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.

Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, thirty cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being - much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have.

When you're a little kid, your heart is open and tender and a harsh word can go straight in and become part of your life.

The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment; you ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don't want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage.

Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That's what they do for a living.

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

Dogs don't lie and why should I? Strangers come they growl and bark, they know their loved ones in the dark, Now let me, by night or day, Be just as full of truth as they.

A good friend is a person who thinks you're one of the good eggs, even if he knows you're a little cracked.

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we've gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota.

Sing your song; don't let the bastards get you down.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.

Secret of life is to go through something harrowing that doesnt kill you...and to love one woman for the rest of your life.

A person does feel sheepish picking on journalists, a class already so richly despised that if a planeload of them crashed in flames, most people would smile from pure reflex.

Easter is so disappointing. You suffer all the way through lent, and what do you get for it? A ham.

We'd all be alot happier if we'd stop assuming we're supposed to be happy.

I can write anywhere. I write in airports. I write on airplanes. I've written in the back seats of taxis. I write in hotel rooms. I love hotel rooms. I just write wherever I am whenever I need to write.

Not everyone has a Life's Work. Some people simply have a Life.

I like to sing and it's just really fun to sing, and I don't get too much. And at my house I'm not allowed to because, you know, your children can't stand it when you sing at home.

It was a pleasure to have somebody else be the boss. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun any other way. He's been around and made a lot of movies and he's a great straightforward person to work for. And it was a pleasure to see other people to pick up characters that you've sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating.

As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

Vodka is tasteless going down, but it is memorable coming up.