Garrison Keillor Quotes

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

No matter what time of year I come here, people always say the same thing: Its not usually like this.

It?s a beautiful descent in a 737, into the Bitterroot Valley, following the Clark Fork River, on a perfect golden autumn day .

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.

People in cars cause accidents and accidents in cars cause people.

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

The problem with paradise is that it's temporary: You don't belong here and the neighbors are nobody you care to know, so it's only blissful for a week or so.

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

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.

A romp in the hay lingers like the first line of a song, but your true love is the one you make a life with and write more than a line about, you write a whole book.

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.

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.

There's so many people who move around our country and lose track of their own ancestry. It's nice to know where you come from.

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

Spending time in a church does not make you religious, any more than spending time in a garage makes you a car.

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

Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.

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

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

Freedom doesn't mean aimlessness. We can't just sleepwalk through life.... Freedom demands structure.

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

It's better to be burnished with use than rusty with principle.

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

Men peak at age nineteen and go downhill.

Every show is your last show. That's my philosophy.

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

..people (in Minnesota) avoid stupidity when possible, not wanting to be a $10 haircut on a 50 cent head.

To choose Norm Coleman over Walter Mondale is like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.

You're such a big liar you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog.

Some people have a love of their fellow man in their hearts, and others require a light anesthetic.

Those people on daytime TV talking about how their parents never gave them the positive feedback they needed and that's why they shot them- those are not Minnesotans.

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.

Being an English major prepares you for impersonating authority.

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.

Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.

Why is divorce so expensive? Because it's worth it!

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.

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.

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

Childhood is the small town everyone came from.

Possessing the ideal makes a person nervous: you sense the inevitable decline just ahead.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

When in doubt, look intelligent.