Top 263 Quotes & Sayings by Garrison Keillor - Page 5

As for family values, they are whatever they are - some families are tight, others are blown away like dandelion puffs. A main value in Minnesota is still: don't waste my time, don't B.S. me, I wasn't born yesterday.

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

That's what I am, Frank thought, an ordinary genius. He had unlocked the secret of radio. The sport of the ordinary! Brillliant me like Reed Seymour couldn't figure this out for the life of them! Reed was ashamed of radio. ...radio was a cinch if you kept reaching down and grabbing up handfuls of the ordinary.

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.

Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.

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

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

You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.

It was a pleasure to have somebody else be the boss. It wouldn't have been nearly as much fun any other way. He's been around and made a lot of movies and he's a great straightforward person to work for. And it was a pleasure to see other people to pick up characters that you've sketched out loosely on paper and make them into something fascinating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you have to avoid mentioning things because people's feelings are tender.

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.

The greatness of America is that it produces exuberant geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire and Leonard Bernstein. We are meant to be a jazzy people who talk big and jump on the table and dance; we aren't supposed to be dopey and glum and brood over old injuries.

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

I usually don't work with other people; I do the whole show myself.

As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.

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.

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

A boy wrote me once to say that he loved it when the news from Lake Wobegon came on the radio because it meant that his parents stopped arguing. That was an eye-opener for me. You work hard to polish your act and then you find out that it does people good in ways you couldn't predict.

I write on a laptop, so it's impossible to count drafts anymore.