When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.