Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn't even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.

There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.

Some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it's only when that thing arrives that they find out that they've been waiting rather than living.

A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

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