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.

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.

Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.

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.

When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.

It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

Some people think it is difficult to be a Christian and to laugh, but I think it's the other way around. God writes a lot of comedy, its just that he has so many bad actors.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have.

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.

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.

Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.

Humor is not a trick, not jokes. Humor is a presence in the world - like grace - and shines on everybody.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

It is more worthy in the eyes of God . . . if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people.

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

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

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.

Sex is not a mechanical act that fails for lack of technique, and it is not a performance by the male for the audience of the female; it is a continuum of attraction that extends from the simplest conversation and the most innocent touching through the act of coitus.