Garrison Keillor Quotes

As for kissing on the first date, you should never date someone whom you would not wish to kiss immediately.

Did you know that half of all people are below average?

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.

Growing up in a place that has winter, you learn to avoid self-pity. Winter is not a personal experience, everybody else is just as cold as you, so you shouldn't complain about it too much. You learn this as a kid, coming home crying from the cold, and Mother looks down and says, 'It's only a little frostbite. You're okay.' And thus you learn to be okay. What's done is done. Get over it. Drink your coffee. It's not the best you'll ever get but it's good enough.

We all know you can get AIDS from sex, but did you know that you can get sex from aides?

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

When you're a little kid, your heart is open and tender and a harsh word can go straight in and become part of your life.

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.

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

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.

The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.

A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.

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.

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

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

I'm not busy ... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.

Evelyn was an insomniac so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to question that.

Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Book is a gift that you can open again and again.

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.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.

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.

The French have a new president, the British will soon have a new P.M., and we envy them as we endure the endless wait for this small dim man to go back to Texas and resume his life.

My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.

People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience--think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouces: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter--poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure--all that matters about poetry to me is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit'ry: no thanks, pal. A person could perish of entertainment, especially comedy, so much of it casually nihilistic, hateful, glittering, cold, and in the end clueless. People in nusing homes die watching late-night television and if I were one of them, I'd be grateful when the darkness descends. Thank God if the pastor comes and offers a psalm and a prayer, and they can attain a glimmer of clarity at the end.

The living wander away, we don't hear from them for months, years - but the dead move in with us to stay.

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

All solutions are temporary, so why not go for duct tape?

Marrying for sex is like flying to London for the free peanuts and pretzels. It's not the point of the thing, is it?

Good old Norwegian cooking: you don't read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality.

IMPORTANT Book reading is a solitary and sedentary pursuit, and those who do are cautioned that a book should be used as an integral part of a well-rounded life, including a daily regimen of rigorous physical exercise, rewarding personal relationships, and sensible low-fat diet. A book should not be used a as a substitute or an excuse.

We thank you [the soldiers recently returned from the middle east] for your service.

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.

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.

I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem,
"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom upon the bough.
It stands among the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my three-score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again ... "
and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples.

America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.

My ability to keep cool in a crisis is based entirely on not knowing all the facts.

WE DEMOCRATS are deeply flawed people, but we do stick to our guns, and believe in decency and public spiritedness and have refused to hitch our wagon to yahooism and intolerance and have supported government as a necessary force for good to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty . . .

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.

Most men are prisoners at best, Who some strong habit every drag about Like chain and ball.

Life itself is brief, and that is what charges the day with such ridiculous beauty.

Winter: It's not just a season, it's who we are.

Three people were going to the guillotine. The first was a lawyer, who was led to the platform, blindfolded, and had his head put on the block. The executioner pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. To avoid a messy lawsuit, the authorities allowed the lawyer to go free. The next man to the guillotine was a priest. They put his head on the block and pulled the lanyard, but nothing happened. The blade didn't come down. They thought it must have been divine intervention, so they let the priest go. The third man to the guillotine was an engineer. He waived his right to a blindfold, so they led him to the guillotine and put his head on the block. As he lay there, he said, Hey, wait. I think I see your problem.

As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.

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.

I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe some of it myself on certain days after the sun went down if I'd had a snort or two and was in Los Angeles and it was February and I was twenty-four, but I find a truer account in the Herald-Star, where it says: "Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business ... Lunch was fried chicken with gravy and creamed peas".

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.

She gave him such a look ... Man oh man, if looks could kill. That one might have totalled a city block.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

I feel like a blind man searching a dark room.
(Old Man Alone on Labor Day Weekend -- blog post)

I usually don't work with other people; I do the whole show myself.

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

I think that if writers are tempted to do other things, they ought to go do other things. They should not write if they don't feel like it. I say this as a competitor. I am not interested in encouraging people who are in competition with me.

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.

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.

Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot.

A man can't eat anger for breakfast and sleep with it at night and not suffer damage to his soul.

If you can't trust your can opener, then what? Is your wastebasket going to get you?

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.

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

There is almost no marital problem that can't be helped enormously by taking off your clothes.

Some of us have a relentless urge to attempt what we can never be good at and neglect our true calling.

Give guilt - the gift that lasts forever.

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.

People meet writers and are bowled over when the writer is friendly to them and invites them to his house for a glass of wine or to shoot up heroin or whatever they do, and they talk their heads off, and a year later it comes out in a book, and there follow years of bitter and fruitless litigation, and that is why you should always keep a writer at arm's length.

Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we've gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota.

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.

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn.

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.

God plays a lot of jokes on us to get our attention.

What liberals must conserve is the middle class: the stable family who can afford to enjoy music and theater and take the kids to Europe someday and put money in the collection plate and save for college and keep up the home and be secure against catastrophe. This family has taken big hits in payroll taxes and loss of buying power and a certain suppressed panic about job security.

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.

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.

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.

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

It was a pleasure to have somebody else be the boss. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun any other way. He's been around and made a lot of movies and he's a great straightforward person to work for. And it was a pleasure to see other people to pick up characters that you've sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating.

A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are blameless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.

I loved feeling special. I hated feeling special.

It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was warm and bright and the trees were in full color, magnificent, explosive, like permanent fireworks - reds and yellows, oranges, some so brilliant that Crayola never put them in crayons for fear the children would color outside the lines.
["Eloise"]

Free enterprise runs on self interest. This is socialism and it runs on loyalty ... if people were going to live by comparison shopping, the town would go bust ... If you live there you have to take it as a whole. That's loyalty.

English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.

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.

A good friend is a person who thinks you're one of the good eggs, even if he knows you're a little cracked.

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.

I write on a laptop, so it's impossible to count drafts anymore.

He takes a kitchen chair and sits in the yard and all the ducks come around. He holds up the cheese curls in one hand and caramel popcorn in the other and his audience looks up and he tells them a joke. He says: So one day a duck come into this bar and ordered a whiskey and a bump and the bartender was pretty surprised, he says, "You know we don't get many of you ducks in here." The duck says, "At these prices I'm not surprised.* And he tosses out the popcorn and they laugh. 'Wak wak wak wak wak. I was shot in the leg in the war.' Have a scar? 'No thanks, I don't smoke.

The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

Roy Blount's stuff makes me laugh so hard, sometimes I have to go sit in a room and shut the door

The funniest line in English is 'Get it?' When you say that, everyone chortles.

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.

On investments, 1998: Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, 30 cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being - much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund.