Top 200 Garrison Keillor Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Woman: Did you know that women are smarter than men? Man: No, I didn’t. Woman: See what I mean?”

— Garrison Keillor

152. “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

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

— Garrison Keillor

154. “Don’t worry about the past and don’t try to solve the future.”

— Garrison Keillor

155. “Do you think it’s right for Christians to use the names of pagan gods for the days of the week?”

— Garrison Keillor

156. “If you lived today as if it were your last, you’d buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn’t you?”

— Garrison Keillor

157. “Nothing that readers say or do strikes me as a nuisance. Anyone who cracks open a book of mine is, to me, a gem.”

— Garrison Keillor

158. “He was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either.”

— Garrison Keillor

159. “This is the big reason most humorists fail. Drunks don’t read books.”

— Garrison Keillor

160. “I think that if writers are tempted to do other things, they ought to go do other things. They should not write if they don’t feel like it. I say this as a competitor. I am not interested in encouraging people who are in competition with me.”

— Garrison Keillor

161. “We’d all be alot happier if we’d stop assuming we’re supposed to be happy.”

— Garrison Keillor

162. “I felt bad for that world that we have given a generation of kids.”

— Garrison Keillor

163. “That’s what high school does for you: gives you some art and music and history so that even if you spend your life raising kids and writing computer programs, still there was a time when you argued about the First Amendment and talked about the Civil War and read Romeo and Juliet.”

— Garrison Keillor

164. “I don’t have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.”

— Garrison Keillor

165. “Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome.”

— Garrison Keillor

166. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

167. “Humor is not about problems with airline luggage handlers. It’s about our lives in America and it’s about the ends of our lives and it’s about everything that happens after that and everything that happened before.”

— Garrison Keillor

168. “Some of us have a relentless urge to attempt what we can never be good at and neglect our true calling.”

— Garrison Keillor

169. “Enough. Man is capable of reform once presented with the facts, and the fact is that bottling water and shipping it is a big waste of fuel, so stop already.”

— Garrison Keillor

170. “Too many of my fellow Christians voted for selfishness and for degradation of the beautiful world God created. I guess they figured that by the time the planet was a smoky wasteland, they’d be nice and comfy in heaven, so wotthehell.”

— Garrison Keillor

171. “A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it’s time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer.”

— Garrison Keillor

172. “I usually don’t work with other people; I do the whole show myself.”

— Garrison Keillor

173. “Couldn’t dance because it would awaken carnal desire, which in my case was not only awake, it was dressed and down on the corner waiting for the bus.”

— Garrison Keillor

174. “People do what they are told not to do. It happens time and time again. Here on the frozen tundra, it is known as the Tongue on the Frozen Pump Handle principle.”

— Garrison Keillor

175. “All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.”

— Garrison Keillor

176. “The living wander away, we don’t hear from them for months, years – but the dead move in with us to stay.”

— Garrison Keillor

177. “I’m a lucky guy. I get to sit around every day and indulge in make believe and get paid for it.”

— Garrison Keillor

178. “I just sort of slid into it, like you’d go for a walk in the woods and fall into a crevasse and wind up in a cave full of rubies and emeralds.”

— Garrison Keillor

179. “Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.”

— Garrison Keillor

180. “It’s important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful. Good parents are the hardest to get rid of.”

— Garrison Keillor

181. “In romance, as in life, you only learn when you’re losing.”

— Garrison Keillor

182. “I don’t want them to be told to remember me.”

— Garrison Keillor

183. “Possessing the ideal makes a person nervous: you sense the inevitable decline just ahead.”

— Garrison Keillor

184. “America of the future will be all malls connected by interstates. All because your parents no longer can their own tomatoes.”

— Garrison Keillor

185. “If you can’t trust your can opener, then what? Is your wastebasket going to get you?”

— Garrison Keillor

186. “They did not weave their lives around yours. They had their own lives, which were mysterious to you.”

— Garrison Keillor

187. “Did you know that half of all people are below average?”

— Garrison Keillor

188. “Eating a little was like vomiting a little, just as bad as a lot.”

— Garrison Keillor

189. “What’s another word for “thesaurus”?”

— Garrison Keillor

190. “One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life...”

— Garrison Keillor

191. “Hurry up! Do it – get it done. You got work to do. Don’t put this off and don’t take the long view. Life is today and tomorrow, and if you are lucky, may be next week.”

— Garrison Keillor

192. “I think that you are only obliged to be a humorist from the age of 18 until you turn 30. Past the age of 30 I don’t think there is any obligation to be clever at all.”

— Garrison Keillor

193. “No matter what time of year I come here, people always say the same thing: Its not usually like this.”

— Garrison Keillor

194. “There’s no mastery to be had. You love the attempt. You don’t master a story any more than you master a river. You feel lucky to canoe down it.”

— Garrison Keillor

195. “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.”

— Garrison Keillor

196. “Roy Blount’s stuff makes me laugh so hard, sometimes I have to go sit in a room and shut the door.”

— Garrison Keillor

197. “There’s so many people who move around our country and lose track of their own ancestry. It’s nice to know where you come from.”

— Garrison Keillor

198. “There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.”

— Garrison Keillor

199. “In California virtually everyone has had their teeth whitened. If they all smiled at once, they would give us a headache.”

— Garrison Keillor

200. “My own life would make a pretty dull story, I think, and I envy him as I drive to work on a cold Minnesota morning across the Mississippi River with its coal barges still struggling upstream like so many of us nowadays.”

— Garrison Keillor