Garrison Keillor
American novelist, humorist, comedian, and public radio personality.
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.
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.
I love sweet corn. It truly is better than sex! I'm not lying! All across the Midwest tonight, a husband and wife will finish what husbands and wives do, and the wife will ask the husband: "How was that?" And, if the man is honest, he'll say "Well, it wasn't sweet corn, but it was nice." It's a fact! Sweet corn is better than sex!...fresh sweet corn!...Store bought sweet corn, yes, sex is definitely better than that!
Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.
If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it's no longer the United States of America as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.
If you can't trust a Methodist with absolute power to arrest people and not have to say why, then whom can you trust?
Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.
The funniest line in English is “Get it?” When you say that, everyone chortles.
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
To the cheater, there is no such thing as honesty, and to Republicans the idea of serving the public good is counterfeit on the face of it — they never felt such an urge, and therefore it must not exist.
Where I'm from we don't trust paper. Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, thirty cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being — much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Going to church no more makes you a Christian than standing in a garage makes you a car.
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.
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, out on the edge of the prairie...
Minnesota is a state of public-spirited and polite people, where you can get a good cappucino and eat Thai food and find any book you want and yet live on a quiet tree-lined street with a backyard and send your kids to public school. When a state this good hits the jackpot, it can only be an inspiration to everybody.
Journalism is a good place for any writer to start — the retailing of fact is always a useful trade and can it help you learn to appreciate the declarative sentence. 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.
Beauty isn't worth thinking about; what's important is your mind. You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.
You'd learn more about the world by lying on the couch and drinking gin out of a bottle than by watching the news.
Jesus said the meek would inherit the earth, but so far all we've gotten is Minnesota and North Dakota.