Top 100 Keillor Garrison Quotes
#1. Scripture doesn't promise that God will remove temptation, only that you'll be given strength to withstand it.
Garrison Keillor
#2. One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.
Garrison Keillor
#3. 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
#4. We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.
Garrison Keillor
#5. Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.
Garrison Keillor
#6. A good friend is a person who thinks you're one of the good eggs, even if he knows you're a little cracked.
Garrison Keillor
#8. Eople (in Minnesota) avoid stupidity when possible, not wanting to be a $10 haircut on a 50 cent head.
Garrison Keillor
#9. Most men are prisoners at best, Who some strong habit every drag about Like chain and ball.
Garrison Keillor
#10. Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo.
Garrison Keillor
#11. There is almost no marital problem that can't be helped enormously by taking off your clothes.
Garrison Keillor
#12. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#13. I feel it's so hard for young actors; It's a different world that they're coming up in; there's so much money to be made off of their personal lives, and people are bound and determined to make that money.
Garrison Keillor
#14. Bravery and adventure! That's the ticket! Don't sit and gather moss. Get up, get out, do what you dream of doing, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and you don't need to made that particular mistake again, but at least you won't get old wondering what if you had.
Garrison Keillor
#15. I love rhymes; I love to write a poem about New York and rhyme 'oysters' with 'The Cloisters.' And 'The lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful.' I just feel a sort of small triumph.
Garrison Keillor
#16. We thank you [the soldiers recently returned from the middle east] for your service.
Garrison Keillor
#17. I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.
Garrison Keillor
#18. Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they're in their own home and nobody's there.
Garrison Keillor
#19. You don't have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you.
Garrison Keillor
#20. 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
#21. Republicans are all about Old Glory and school prayer and the sanctity of marriage and the Fatherhood of God but when it comes to actually needing help from them, you shouldn't get your hopes up. They might send an ambulance or they might just send a Get Well card.
Garrison Keillor
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.
Garrison Keillor
#25. God is a great humorist. He just has a slow audience to work with.
Garrison Keillor
#26. 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
#27. Some of us have a relentless urge to attempt what we can never be good at and neglect our true calling.
Garrison Keillor
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.
Garrison Keillor
#32. 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
#33. You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.
Garrison Keillor
#34. Ralph Stanley is like an uncle to us and now that all my uncles are gone, Ralph's singing is even more precious. This album of classic folk songs is one of his best.
Garrison Keillor
#36. The living wander away, we don't hear from them for months, years - but the dead move in with us to stay.
Garrison Keillor
#37. We'd all be alot happier if we'd stop assuming we're supposed to be happy.
Garrison Keillor
#39. You young people learned spelling by the 'Close Enough' method.
Garrison Keillor
#40. 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
#41. One day Donald Trump will discover that he is owned by Lutheran Brotherhood and must re negotiate his debt load with a committee of silent Norwegians who dont understand why anyone would pay more than $120.00 for a suit.
Garrison Keillor
#42. God writes a lot of comedy ... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.
Garrison Keillor
#43. Never insult a writer. You may find yourself immortalized in ways you may not appreciate.
Garrison Keillor
#44. Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.
Garrison Keillor
#45. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#46. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#47. Beauty isn't worth thinking about. What's important is your mind. You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head. - Garrison Keillor, American humorist
Habib Sadeghi
#48. If the marriage needs help, the answer almost always is have more fun. Drop your list of grievances and go ride a roller coaster.
Garrison Keillor
#49. You've got work to do. Don't put this off. And don't take the long view, here. You know? Life is today and tomorrow and- and if you're lucky, next week.
Garrison Keillor
#51. America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.
Garrison Keillor
#52. 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
#53. I longed for the pitter-patter of little feet, so I got a dog. It's cheaper, and you get more feet.
Garrison Keillor
#54. 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
#55. Life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty.
Garrison Keillor
#56. How many pessimists does it take to change a lightbulb? Never mind. Nobody would get the joke anyway.
Garrison Keillor
#57. A man can't eat anger for breakfast and sleep with it at night and not suffer damage to his soul.
Garrison Keillor
#58. Humor is not a trick, not jokes. Humor is a presence in the world - like grace - and shines on everybody.
Garrison Keillor
#59. The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.
Garrison Keillor
#60. 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
#61. Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.
Garrison Keillor
#62. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#63. People always are encouraging about a terrible loss, so that sometimes the loser would like to strangle them.
Garrison Keillor
#64. Spending time in a church does not make you religious, any more than spending time in a garage makes you a car.
Garrison Keillor
#65. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#66. Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone.
Garrison Keillor
#67. I'm not busy ... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.
Garrison Keillor
#68. I write for a radio show that, no matter what, will go on the air Saturday at five o'clock central time. You learn to write toward that deadline, to let the adrenaline pick you up on Friday morning and carry you through, to cook up a monologue about Lake Wobegon and get to the theater on time.
Garrison Keillor
#69. Secret of life is to go through something harrowing that doesnt kill you ... and to love one woman for the rest of your life.
Garrison Keillor
#70. Roy Blount's stuff makes me laugh so hard, sometimes I have to go sit in a room and shut the door
Garrison Keillor
#71. Woman: Did you know that women are smarter than men? Man: No, I didn't. Woman: See what I mean?
Garrison Keillor
#72. She gave him such a look ... Man oh man, if looks could kill. That one might have totalled a city block.
Garrison Keillor
#73. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#74. 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
#75. A book is a gift you can open again and again.
Garrison Keillor
T.Q. Bernier
#76. Dogs don't lie and why should I? Strangers come they growl and bark, they know their loved ones in the dark, Now let me, by night or day, Be just as full of truth as they.
Garrison Keillor
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.
Garrison Keillor
#80. My own life would make a pretty dull story, I think, and I envy him as I drive to work on a cold Minnesota morning across the Mississippi River with its coal barges still struggling upstream like so many of us nowadays.
Garrison Keillor
#81. 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
#82. People in cars cause accidents and accidents in cars cause people.
Garrison Keillor
#83. 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
#84. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#85. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#86. 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
#87. The most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.
Garrison Keillor
#88. I just sort of slid into it, like you'd go for a walk in the woods and fall into a crevasse and wind up in a cave full of rubies and emeralds.
Garrison Keillor
#89. In California virtually everyone has had their teeth whitened. If they all smiled at once, they would give us a headache.
Garrison Keillor
#90. 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
#92. Don't pour the oil directly into my navel, pour it on my sternum and let it run down into my navel, you ignorant peasant.
Garrison Keillor
#93. English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.
Garrison Keillor
#95. 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.
Garrison Keillor
#96. tragic Powell, the Company Man Who Could Have Been Great, who was offered the mantle by all the polls but deferred to the Boss's Callow Son and vouched for him,
Garrison Keillor
#97. 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
#98. In romance, as in life, you only learn when you're losing.
Garrison Keillor
#99. 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
#100. 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
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