Garrison Keillor Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
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After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.
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People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
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Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
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From the sons of Ith, the first of the Gael to get his death in Ireland, there came in the after time Fathadh Canaan, that got the sway over the whole world from the rising to the setting sun, and that took hostages of the streams and the birds and the languages.
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Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
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Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.
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We try to make the name longer and longer every year. First, it was 'Larry the Cable Guy's Christmas Spectacular.' Then it was 'It's a Very Larry Christmas.' Now it's 'Larry the Cable Guy's Hula-palooza Christmas Luau.' I'll tell you what it is: It's funny. That's what it is. Who cares what the name of it is? It is a funny special.
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I'm not afraid of death, but I resent it. I think it's unfair and irritating.
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There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.
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Flirting is funny. And it's awkward and weird.
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I got tired of books where the boy is a bit thick and the girl's very clever. Why does it have to such an opposition? Why can't they be like the girls and boys that I know personally, who are equally funny and equally cross? Who get things equally wrong and are equally brave? And make the same mistakes?
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When it comes to jump-starting the intricate machinery of recollection, there's nothing more effective than the scent of approaching death.
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I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.
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There's stuff I don't like to rehearse, really emotional things, I don't like to rehearse. You just beat it to death.
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Daddy was hilarious. He could take the most mundane event and tell it so that we all on the floor laughing. He trained me in the joys of humor.
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When the courts decide that murderers, rapists, and others who maliciously break our social contract deserve health care that most working Americans can't afford, they are condemning good people to death.
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Death is the ultimate negative.
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The words that come direct from the people are the greatest... If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.
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I cannot understand why the poets of our day wax indignant at the vulgarity of their age and complain of having come into the world too early or too late. I believe that every man of intellect can create his own beautiful fable of life.
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The hockey I was raised on, the hockey I understand, the hockey that my dad taught me about when I was a boy was intrinsically connected with fighting. I grew up in a house where we revered tough guys.
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Avarice, the spur of industry.
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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.
