407 Quotes by Garrison Keillor

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.

People in cars cause accidents and accidents in cars cause people.

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.

Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.

You'd learn more about the world by lying on the couch and drinking gin out of a bottle than by watching the news.

Freedom doesn't mean aimlessness. We can't just sleepwalk through life.... Freedom demands structure.

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.

There is almost no marital problem that can't be helped enormously by taking off your clothes.