Garrison Keillor Quotes

All solutions are temporary, so why not go for duct tape?

You can go your whole life and not need math or physics for a minute, but the ability to tell a joke is always handy.

March is the month God created to show people who don't drink what a hangover is like.

Have interesting failures.... If you need to have a personal crisis have it now. Don't wait until midlife, when it will take longer to resolve.... Don't pity yourselves. Lighten up. Seek people with a sense of humor. Avoid humorless people-and do not marry one, for God's sake.

In romance, as in life, you only learn when you're losing.

I thought A Prairie Home Companion would be an interesting thing to do for a summer or so. Public radio was just seven years old in 1974. It was a tiny organization in which a lot of things got started simply because there was all this time to fill. If you wanted to do an hour on Lithuanian folk dancing, you probably could have done it.

I talk in subjects and verbs, and sort of wind around in concentric circles until I get far enough away from the beginning so that I can call it the end, and it ends.

I think that you are only obliged to be a humorist from the age of 18 until you turn 30. Past the age of 30 I don't think there is any obligation to be clever at all.

Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.

Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.

Childhood is the small town everyone came from.

The funniest line in English is 'Get it?' When you say that, everyone chortles.

Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon

Marrying for sex is like flying to London for the free peanuts and pretzels. It's not the point of the thing, is it?

I've seen the truth, and it makes no sense.

Scripture doesn't promise that God will remove temptation, only that you'll be given strength to withstand it.

When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.

A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.

I felt bad for that world that we have given a generation of kids.

When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word.

She gave him such a look... Man oh man, if looks could kill. That one might have totalled a city block.

All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.

Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot.

Growing up in a place that has winter, you learn to avoid self-pity. Winter is not a personal experience, everybody else is just as cold as you, so you shouldn't complain about it too much. You learn this as a kid, coming home crying from the cold, and Mother looks down and says, 'It's only a little frostbite. You're okay.' And thus you learn to be okay. What's done is done. Get over it. Drink your coffee. It's not the best you'll ever get but it's good enough.

As for family values, they are whatever they are - some families are tight, others are blown away like dandelion puffs. A main value in Minnesota is still: don't waste my time, don't B.S. me, I wasn't born yesterday.

Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs.

Sometimes there is nothing you can do, and in those times, you must do something anyway.

There is almost no marital problem that can't be helped enormously by taking off your clothes.

You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.

Before the world was made, when it was only darkness and mist and waters, God was well aware of Lake Wobegon, my family, our house, and He had me all sketched out down to what size my feet would be (big), which bike I would ride (Schwinn), and the five ears of corn I'd eat for supper that night.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo.

The thought of people in this day and age sitting down to listen to a radio variety show on Saturday evening is rather implausible and was even more so in 1974 when we started “A Prairie Home Companion.” Thank goodness Minnesota Public Radio was too poor to afford good advice or the show never would've got on the air. We only did it because we knew it would be fun to do. It was a dumb idea. I wish I knew how to be that dumb again.

In Lake Wobegon, we don't forget mistakes.

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

Some people think it is difficult to be a Christian and to laugh, but I think it's the other way around. God writes a lot of comedy, its just that he has so many bad actors.

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

I don't associate work with feelings of satisfaction. Rather, guilt, frustration, and resentment of people who write better than I do.

I remember when I switched from Christmas to sex as the secret of happiness.

The audience is invisible and that's good. Somewhere my voice is drifting through a swine barn and the sound of it seems to perk up the sows' appetite. Or a lady is listening on headphones as she jogs along a beach, running to my cadence. Or a dog sits in front of the radio, head cocked, and the sibilants excite him in some mysterious way. A dog's humorist, that's me.

I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.

Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God's green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.

It is more worthy in the eyes of God . . . if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.

Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone.

When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.