Top 200 Garrison Keillor Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.”

— Garrison Keillor

102. “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

103. “When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.”

— Garrison Keillor

104. “Love has the power to rescue us and not let go, otherwise it isn’t love.”

— Garrison Keillor

105. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

106. “We all know you can get AIDS from sex, but did you know that you can get sex from aides?”

— Garrison Keillor

107. “I’ve seen the truth, and it makes no sense.”

— Garrison Keillor

108. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

109. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

110. “Don’t pour the oil directly into my navel, pour it on my sternum and let it run down into my navel, you ignorant peasant.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

112. “Good old Norwegian cooking: you don’t read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality.”

— Garrison Keillor

113. “God is a great humorist. He just has a slow audience to work with.”

— Garrison Keillor

114. “Going to church no more making you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car.”

— Garrison Keillor

115. “A person does feel sheepish picking on journalists, a class already so richly despised that if a planeload of them crashed in flames, most people would smile from pure reflex.”

— Garrison Keillor

116. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

117. “When NASA started sending up astronauts, they discovered that ballpoint pens don’t work in zero gravity. So they spent twelve million dollars and more than a decade developing a pen that writes under any condition, on almost every surface. The Russians used a pencil.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

119. “You don’t have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you.”

— Garrison Keillor

120. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

121. “Republicans are all about Old Glory and school prayer and the sanctity of marriage and the Fatherhood of God but when it comes to actually needing help from them, you shouldn’t get your hopes up. They might send an ambulance or they might just send a Get Well card.”

— Garrison Keillor

122. “To Norwegians, the polka is a form of martial art.”

— Garrison Keillor

123. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

125. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

126. “An interesting thing about New York City is that the subways run through the sewers.”

— Garrison Keillor

127. “I feel it’s so hard for young actors; It’s a different world that they’re coming up in; there’s so much money to be made off of their personal lives, and people are bound and determined to make that money.”

— Garrison Keillor

128. “I can write anywhere. I write in airports. I write on airplanes. I’ve written in the back seats of taxis. I write in hotel rooms. I love hotel rooms. I just write wherever I am whenever I need to write.”

— Garrison Keillor

129. “Those people on daytime TV talking about how their parents never gave them the positive feedback they needed and that’s why they shot them- those are not Minnesotans.”

— Garrison Keillor

130. “A romp in the hay lingers like the first line of a song, but your true love is the one you make a life with and write more than a line about, you write a whole book.”

— Garrison Keillor

131. “Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it.”

— Garrison Keillor

132. “Men peak at age nineteen and go downhill.”

— Garrison Keillor

133. “To choose Norm Coleman over Walter Mondale is like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich.”

— Garrison Keillor

134. “I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.”

— Garrison Keillor

135. “Not everyone has a Life’s Work. Some people simply have a Life.”

— Garrison Keillor

136. “Woman: Did you know that women are smarter than men? Man: No, I didn’t. Woman: See what I mean?”

— Garrison Keillor

137. “When you come to expect humor of people, you will never get it.”

— Garrison Keillor

138. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

139. “I grew up in a fundamentalist protestant family that stressed that we were a select people and so we were to avoid contact with others who did not share our faith.”

— Garrison Keillor

140. “Vodka is tasteless going down, but it is memorable coming up.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

142. “I don’t associate work with feelings of satisfaction. Rather, guilt, frustration, and resentment of people who write better than I do.”

— Garrison Keillor

143. “The mass of men lead lives of shallow happiness; the superior man exults in his gloom.”

— Garrison Keillor

144. “I’m of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I’d be doing nothing else. You don’t want to be remembered? I don’t want them to be told to remember me.”

— Garrison Keillor

145. “I feel like a blind man searching a dark room for a pair of black socks that aren’t there.”

— Garrison Keillor

146. “I write on a laptop, so it’s impossible to count drafts anymore.”

— Garrison Keillor

147. “Librarians, Dusty, possess a vast store of politeness. These are people who get asked regularly the dumbest questions on God’s green earth. These people tolerate every kind of crank and eccentric and mouth breather there is.”

— Garrison Keillor

148. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

149. “People in cars cause accidents and accidents in cars cause people.”

— Garrison Keillor

150. “Boys, the first drink is a boon, the second is a gamble, the third is poor judgment, and then the rate of descent gets steep.”

— Garrison Keillor