Top 100 Garrison Keillor Quotes
#1. Scripture doesn't promise that God will remove temptation, only that you'll be given strength to withstand it.
Garrison Keillor
#2. Too many of my fellow Christians voted for selfishness and for degradation of the beautiful world God created. I guess they figured that by the time the planet was a smoky wasteland, they'd be nice and comfy in heaven, so wotthehell.
Garrison Keillor
#3. Most men are prisoners at best, Who some strong habit every drag about Like chain and ball.
Garrison Keillor
#4. There is almost no marital problem that can't be helped enormously by taking off your clothes.
Garrison Keillor
#5. Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they're in their own home and nobody's there.
Garrison Keillor
#6. That's the news from Lake Woebegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Garrison Keillor
#7. I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.
Garrison Keillor
#8. What would people think?'
Jesus said that people think all sorts of things. The human mind is like a cloud of gnats. Constant motion. That's why you have to look at the heart.
'Oh,' said Grandpa.
Garrison Keillor
#9. The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.
Garrison Keillor
#10. When NASA started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ballpoint pens don't work in zero gravity. So they spent twelve million dollars and more than a decade developing a pen that writes under any condition, on almost every surface. The Russians used a pencil.
Garrison Keillor
#11. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#12. You learn this great lesson of life: it's not about me. It's just not. The matter of talent-which seemed so important to you when you were young-is not of great importance. We're simply a conduit. We take things out of the air into us and put them in the form of stories. That's pretty much it.
Garrison Keillor
#13. Nothing that readers say or do strikes me as a nuisance. Anyone who cracks open a book of mine is, to me, a gem.
Garrison Keillor
#15. Take care of your friends. Because there will come a time when you'll be no good to anyone, and the only reason for people to talk to you will be sheer habit.
Garrison Keillor
#17. America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.
Garrison Keillor
#18. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#19. I longed for the pitter-patter of little feet, so I got a dog. It's cheaper, and you get more feet.
Garrison Keillor
#20. Sex is not a mechanical act that fails for lack of technique, and it is not a performance by the male for the audience of the female; it is a continuum of attraction that extends from the simplest conversation and the most innocent touching through the act of coitus.
Garrison Keillor
#21. Life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty.
Garrison Keillor
#22. How many pessimists does it take to change a lightbulb? Never mind. Nobody would get the joke anyway.
Garrison Keillor
#23. It's confidence; it has to be something good about getting old. One of the things is that you just don't stress about some stuff that made you so worried.
Garrison Keillor
#24. Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.
Garrison Keillor
#25. People always are encouraging about a terrible loss, so that sometimes the loser would like to strangle them.
Garrison Keillor
#26. Spending time in a church does not make you religious, any more than spending time in a garage makes you a car.
Garrison Keillor
#27. I'm not busy ... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.
Garrison Keillor
#28. Powdermilk biscuits: Heavens, theyre tasty and expeditious! Theyre made from whole wheat, to give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done
Garrison Keillor
#29. A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded gun on your coffee table- There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about.
Garrison Keillor
#30. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#31. He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.
Garrison Keillor
#32. You'd learn more about the world by lying on the couch and drinking gin out of a bottle than by watching the news.
Garrison Keillor
#33. People in cars cause accidents and accidents in cars cause people.
Garrison Keillor
#34. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#35. My God, rich people have the time to praise You if they want to, but the poor people are so busy, accept their work as praise because, my God, they don't have time for everything.
Garrison Keillor
#36. The most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.
Garrison Keillor
#37. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#38. I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.
Garrison Keillor
#39. In romance, as in life, you only learn when you're losing.
Garrison Keillor
#40. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#41. Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books ... On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours.
Garrison Keillor
#42. Where I come from, when a Catholic marries a Lutheran it is considered the first step on the road to Minneapolis.
Garrison Keillor
#43. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#44. A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.
Garrison Keillor
#45. Computers can never completely replace humans. They may become capable of artificial intelligence, but they will never master real stupidity.
Garrison Keillor
#46. Sometimes I think I understand everything - then I regain consciousness.
Garrison Keillor
#47. Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That's what they do for a living.
Garrison Keillor
#49. I remember when I switched from Christmas to sex as the secret of happiness ...
Garrison Keillor
#50. Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.
Garrison Keillor
#51. This is the big reason most humorists fail. Drunks don't read books.
Garrison Keillor
#52. We all know you can get AIDS from sex, but did you know that you can get sex from aides?
Garrison Keillor
#53. The majority of people who keel over dead at concerts are killed by a long trumpet passage.
Garrison Keillor
#54. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#55. Opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy - a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.
Garrison Keillor
#56. Vodka is tasteless going down, but it is memorable coming up.
Garrison Keillor
#58. Going to church no more making you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car.
Garrison Keillor
#59. To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it - they never felt such an urge, and therefore it must not exist.
Garrison Keillor
#60. The socially redeeming aspect of golf lies in the vast number of lawyers and bankers and managers who play it, and when you think of the damage they would do if they were at the job instead, you can see why golf courses are a wise investment for any municipality.
Garrison Keillor
#62. By God, no matter what Republicans say, the people of this country really do care about each other. We are not a cold people. By God, when John F. Kennedy said, "Ask what you can do for your country," he spoke to this country's heart and conscience.
Garrison Keillor
#63. I never was one to get upset about a few scratches on a motor vehicle, it is meant to be used, not saved.
Garrison Keillor
#64. We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle, and if you should feel really happy, be patient: this will pass.
Garrison Keillor
#66. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#67. Liberalism is dead, so dead that Democrats have all become moderate Republicans, and the heavy hand of Big Government is now limp and damp and trembly.
Garrison Keillor
#68. I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
Garrison Keillor
#69. As for kissing on the first date, you should never date someone whom you would not wish to kiss immediately.
Garrison Keillor
#70. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#71. They did not weave their lives around yours. They had their own lives, which were mysterious to you.
Garrison Keillor
#73. 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
Garrison Keillor
#74. A boy wrote me once to say that he loved it when the news from Lake Wobegon came on the radio because it meant that his parents stopped arguing. That was an eye-opener for me. You work hard to polish your act and then you find out that it does people good in ways you couldn't predict.
Garrison Keillor
#75. There's no mastery to be had. You love the attempt. You don't master a story any more than you master a river. You feel lucky to canoe down it.
Garrison Keillor
#76. The great unrequited love tears open your heart to the beauty of the world, its small rivers and upland meadows. It also makes you kinder to the next hundred thousand persons who cross your path.
Garrison Keillor
#77. How many consultants does it take to change a lightbulb? I'll have an estimate for you a week from Monday.
Garrison Keillor
#78. Life is continuous. Life never stops. We come to the really great questions and before we can answer them, life has moved on to something else.
Garrison Keillor
#79. You are never so smart again in a language learned in middle age nor so romantic, brave or kind.
Garrison Keillor
#80. Not everyone has a Life's Work. Some people simply have a Life.
Garrison Keillor
#81. It?s a beautiful descent in a 737, into the Bitterroot Valley, following the Clark Fork River, on a perfect golden autumn day .
Garrison Keillor
#82. An interesting thing about New York City is that the subways run through the sewers.
Garrison Keillor
#83. I usually don't work with other people; I do the whole show myself.
Garrison Keillor
#84. Boys, the first drink is a boon, the second is a gamble, the third is poor judgment, and then the rate of descent gets steep
Garrison Keillor
#85. Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Garrison Keillor
#86. A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it's time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.
Garrison Keillor
#87. You get old and you realize there are no answers, just stories.
Garrison Keillor
#89. Pumpkin pie is a living symbol of mediocrity. The best pumpkin pie you ever ate wasn't all that much different from the worst pumpkin pie you ever ate.
Garrison Keillor
#90. You're such a big liar you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog.
Garrison Keillor
#91. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#92. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#93. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#94. Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.
Garrison Keillor
#95. 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
Garrison Keillor
#96. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#97. If you can't read a simple goddam sign and follow one simple goddam instruction then get your fat butt the hell out of here.
Garrison Keillor
#99. Sometimes you have to avoid mentioning things because people's feelings are tender.
Garrison Keillor
#100. To your left is the marina where several senior cabinet officials keep luxury
yachts for weekend cruises on the Potomac. Some of these ships are up to 100
feet in length; the Presidential yacht is over 200 feet in length, and can
remain submerged for up to 3 weeks.
Garrison Keillor
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