Garrison Keillor Quotes - Page 7

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.

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.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo.

I love New York, and I'm drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I've just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.

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

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

I've seen the truth, and it makes no sense.

We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

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.

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

Why is divorce so expensive? Because it's worth it!

Where I come from, when a Catholic marries a Lutheran it is considered the first step on the road to Minneapolis.

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.

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.

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

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

It's better to be burnished with use than rusty with principle.

Men peak at age nineteen and go downhill.

It is a sin to believe evil of others but it is seldom a mistake.

The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment; you ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don't want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage.

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

I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.

People always are encouraging about a terrible loss, so that sometimes the loser would like to strangle them.

Honesty is a rare commodity in a palace, and that is why so many fairy-tale marriages end up on the rocks.