A Prairie Home Companion

People who knew my hero A.J. Liebling say that he sat typing in his office at ‘The New Yorker,’ chortling at what he had written, and I’ve pondered that fact for years. I think maybe laughing is a skill, like singing, and I had a somber youth and didn’t develop the muscle of laughter to the same extent as normal people. I am a dreadful audience member for any comedian and so I never sit down front. It’d be painful for a comedian to look at my long face for an hour —— he or she might quit the business and go into accounting.

- Does Garrison laugh at his own jokes while he’s writing?

There doesn’t seem to be time to sit and savor my own work, and also I am afraid that if I looked at it, I’d find a lot of uninteresting stuff. Times change, the tide comes in and out, many winters have passed, and what interested me back in 1978 is not so much on my mind anymore. Keep looking ahead, is my advice. Get up in the morning and deal with that day and enjoy whatever work you put your hand to.

- Garrison describes a bit of his writing process and offers some advice on moving forward once a piece is finished, in the latest edition of Post To The Host

It doesn’t seem fair for the Midwest, the nation’s icebox, to be the nation’s oven too.

- Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home (via theycallmegomer)

One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don’t read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining.

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Garrison Keillor

(via kerryquotesquotes)

No book is ever really finished — it’s simply yanked out of the author’s hands and set in type — and that’s why authors don’t sit around savoring their own work.

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In his latest Post to the Host response, Garrison explains the differences between the hardcover and paperback editions of A Christmas Blizzard.

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