In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn't stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was 30 minutes from being dead.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!

I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.

Posthumous reputations have little to do with real lives.

The richer you are and the more financial advisers you employ, the less likelihood there is that you can ever discover what you are really worth.

There are jobs, particularly database-oriented ones, for which computers are necessary, but for everyday office life, I question whether they have brought the productivity that their enormous cost, up to £10,000 per person, demands.

I only buy a computer when it's two years old, after the glitches have been worked out.

I never sue journalists. I employ journalists. I employ too many of them. I don't sue journalists.