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
I felt bad for that world that we have given a generation of kids.
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.
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.
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 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.
Nothing that readers say or do strikes me as a nuisance. Anyone who cracks open a book of mine is, to me, a gem.
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.
I don't associate work with feelings of satisfaction. Rather, guilt, frustration, and resentment of people who write better than I do.
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.