Top 200 Garrison Keillor Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.”

— Garrison Keillor

102. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

104. “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

105. “Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.”

— Garrison Keillor

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

110. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

112. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

114. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

122. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

133. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

139. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

141. “Your car, comfort though it be, this little den and dining room on wheels, is a prison that deadens your senses, and to feel wholly alive you must go for a walk.”

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

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

— Garrison Keillor

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

148. “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

149. “You don’t want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.”

— Garrison Keillor

150. “Some people have a love of their fellow man in their hearts, and others require a light anesthetic.”

— Garrison Keillor