Garrison Keillor Minnesota writer, humorist and radio show personality Famous Quotes Homepage

Both Bonnett and I first listened to Garrison Kiellor’s morning radio while getting ready for our day of high school in Little Falls, Minnesota. It was aired starting in 1969 on Minnesota Public Radio and broadcast from St. Johns University in Collegeville, MN. In 1974 Kiellor started his live radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which expanded his use of live music in the radio studio to a larger scale production. Like his initial morning radio show, the Saturday evening broadcasts feature an eclectic blend of music and humor.

As a writer, he has had many articles, columns and short stories published by magazines including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, various newspapers and the e-zine, Salon.com. He also has a number of novels and short story collections in print. Keillor’s writing work now spans the mediums of print, audio and video - with his specials on DVD’s and the Robert Altman movie about A Prairie Home Companion, featuring the actors Kevin Klein, Lilly Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrrelson, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, Tommy Lee Jones, Mia Rudolph and John C. Reilly (Garrison played the part of GK) – but also spans a variety of business venues which now include the opening of his bookstore in the basement level of a downtown St. Paul, MN restaurant in 2006. We hope to visit it soon to see if “Common Good Books, G. Keillor, Prop.” lives up to the store’s promising name. While we bet it probably will, we wouldn’t want to say for sure until we’ve seen the store for ourselves. When we do, we’ll keep all of you posted.

“A good newspaper is never nearly good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

“A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.”

“Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.”

“A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.”

“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.”

“I'm not busy... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.”

While Prince and Jesse Ventura called attention to our mostly ‘fair state of Minnesota’ a while back, and every so often once in a while yet, Garrison Keillor is kind of a week-in-week-out P-R man for Minnesotans pretty much nonstop. So we’re pretty much OK then when he exaggerates the way we talk here, even though we know that its not quite so much of a Minnesota way of talking as he makes out it is.

“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”

“This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger. Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader.”

Garrison Keillor, writer and host of ‘A Prairie Home Companion’, the live variety radio show modeled loosely after radio shows that were broadcast and listened to prior to the ascent of television, has been bringing all things ‘Minnesota’ to the rest of the planet for over 33 years.

“Intelligence is like a four-wheel drive. It allows you to get stuck in more remote places.”