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.
Garrison KeillorRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Humor relies on surprise to be effective; without it, it loses its comedic value.
In this quote, Garrison Keillor emphasizes the essential element of surprise in humor. When humor fails to catch us off guard, it ceases to be funny, and labeling someone as a humorist can detract from that element of surprise, limiting their creativity and spontaneity in writing.
Themes
HumorSurpriseWritingCreativityFunny
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a comedy workshop to inspire writers to embrace the unexpected.
More from Garrison Keillor
All quotes βTravel 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.
Garrison KeillorRead
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.
Garrison KeillorRead
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.
Garrison KeillorRead
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.
Garrison KeillorRead
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
Garrison KeillorRead
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