Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor
Gary Edward "Garrison" Keilloris an American author, storyteller, humorist, radio actor, voice actor, and radio personality. He is known as creator of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion, which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in A...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRadio Host
Date of Birth7 August 1942
CityAnoka, MN
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Sometimes you have to avoid mentioning things because people's feelings are tender.
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 usually don't work with other people; I do the whole show myself.
When you come to expect humor of people, you will never get it.
I write on a laptop, so it's impossible to count drafts anymore.
You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.
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.
The audience is invisible and that's good. Somewhere my voice is drifting through a swine barn and the sound of it seems to perk up the sows' appetite. Or a lady is listening on headphones as she jogs along a beach, running to my cadence. Or a dog sits in front of the radio, head cocked, and the sibilants excite him in some mysterious way. A dog's humorist, that's me.
Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That's what they do for a living.
Most men are prisoners at best, Who some strong habit every drag about Like chain and ball.
The mass of men lead lives of shallow happiness; the superior man exults in his gloom.
There's no mastery to be had. You love the attempt. You don't master a story any more than you master a river. You feel lucky to canoe down it.
To Norwegians, the polka is a form of martial art.