Garrison Keillor Quotes
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It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
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Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we've gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota.
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The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.
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The highlight of my childhood was making my brother laugh so hard that food came out of his nose.
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Zoroastrians believe in one Great Almighty Spirit of Good who is in combat against evil forces, and Goodness prevails in the end. There is no self-flagellation or staring at the sun or snake-handling.
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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.
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If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?
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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.
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Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
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A book is a gift you can open again and again.
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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.
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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.
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Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
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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.
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I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
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Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.
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It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
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Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.
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In electronic publishing, they're are no editors and if their are there not very good.
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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.