Top 200 Garrison Keillor Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “A child can educate just about anybody.”

— Garrison Keillor

53. “Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material.”

— Garrison Keillor

54. “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

55. “It’s better to be burnished with use than rusty with principle.”

— Garrison Keillor

56. “Don’t tear up the page and start over again when you write a bad line-try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Writing is a means of discovery, always.”

— Garrison Keillor

57. “Being rich and thin isn’t everything.”

— Garrison Keillor

58. “That’s why God created marriage, so people wouldn’t have to fight with strangers.”

— Garrison Keillor

59. “I loved feeling special. I hated feeling special.”

— Garrison Keillor

60. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

61. “If you can’t trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?”

— Garrison Keillor

62. “All solutions are temporary, so why not go for duct tape?”

— Garrison Keillor

63. “The relationship between truth and a newspaper is like the relationship between the color green and the number seven. Occasionally you will see the number seven written in green, but you learn not to expect this.”

— Garrison Keillor

64. “No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs.”

— Garrison Keillor

65. “I like to sing and it’s just really fun to sing, and I don’t get too much. And at my house I’m not allowed to because, you know, your children can’t stand it when you sing at home.”

— Garrison Keillor

66. “Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.”

— Garrison Keillor

67. “I was brought up imagining that cream rises to the top, merit wins out, the race is to the swift and riches to men of understanding, but it ain’t necessarily so. The swift stand a better chance if they are also beautiful.”

— Garrison Keillor

68. “I remember when I switched from Christmas to sex as the secret of happiness...”

— Garrison Keillor

69. “Give guilt – the gift that lasts forever.”

— Garrison Keillor

70. “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

71. “The majority of people who keel over dead at concerts are killed by a long trumpet passage.”

— Garrison Keillor

72. “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

73. “Humor is not a trick, not jokes. Humor is a presence in the world – like grace – and shines on everybody.”

— Garrison Keillor

74. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

75. “I think if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world for all of us.”

— Garrison Keillor

76. “The funniest line in English is ‘Get it?’ When you say that, everyone chortles.”

— Garrison Keillor

77. “Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.”

— Garrison Keillor

78. “Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

80. “In Lake Wobegon, we don’t forget mistakes.”

— Garrison Keillor

81. “When it comes to finding available men in Minnesota, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

— Garrison Keillor

82. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

83. “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

84. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

85. “Second violins can play a concerto perfectly if they’re in their own home and nobody’s there.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

87. “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

88. “Marriage, friends, is a lifelong feast; love is no light lunch.”

— Garrison Keillor

89. “Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either.”

— Garrison Keillor

90. “You’re such a big liar you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

93. “A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table – There’s nothing wrong with them, but it’s hard to stop thinking about it.”

— Garrison Keillor

94. “Sometimes you have to avoid mentioning things because people’s feelings are tender.”

— Garrison Keillor

95. “In the end, all solutions are temporary.”

— Garrison Keillor

96. “Never insult a writer. You may find yourself immortalized in ways you may not appreciate.”

— Garrison Keillor

97. “When you’re old you feast on your memories, and if you spend too much time on exercise, you may get old and not have many.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

99. “A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.”

— Garrison Keillor

100. “TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle.”

— Garrison Keillor