Kelli Garner Quotes

I get around OK with a toolbox. As a kid, I picked up skills following my dad through the oil fields of Oklahoma and West Texas. My wife Janine is hard to impress, but she does think it's cool when I fix things around the house.

I like the guy who reads. Being articulate is something that's very important to me. But you need to know how to chop wood and fix a car and do guy things. I didn't grow up with spectators. Nobody was a spectator.

I have no interest in a guy who doesn't know the right end of a screwdriver.

I'm a practical person. I'm not too bad a carpenter. I can renovate houses.

I started to learn some common sense. Even just sort of day-to-day things. I started to cook a little bit more and try to learn to fix things around the house. If something breaks down, rather than call a guy, there's got to be more I can do.

DIY skills are hot. The ability to put up a shelf and hang a picture is always good and being able to cook. Cooking's really hot.

An axe at home saves hiring a carpenter.

A real man don't call the plumbers. If he gonna call himself a man, he needs to know how to fix it, on the spot

I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the picture of a toilet and the text she read to me explaining how the parts worked, I fixed it.

I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.'

My parents taught me many of the things that people need in life to feel confident: practical things, such as managing finances, mucking out the goat barn, cleaning a house, doing repairs, mending a broken roof or a toilet.

I won't date a guy who doesn't own a toolbox. I'm not saying you need to be able to knock down a wall or build a house or anything like that. But I've been out with a couple of guys who didn't own toolboxes, and they couldn't even change a light bulb.

I'm a DIY kinda guy.

My dad was always busy. You would pop round for a cup of tea, and within minutes you would see him walking past with a step-ladder. He was always fixing things.

I'm not in the business of telling people 'DIY or die,' but I do think it's important to be as hands-on with what you're doing as possible.

The only thing I knew how to do without a lot of money was repairing tools. I actually started making and repairing tools for machines.

The decline of practical skills, some of them very day-to-day, among a generation of British men is very worrying. They can't put up a shelf, wire a plug, countersink a screw, iron a shirt. They believe it's endearing and cute to be useless, whereas I think it's boring, and everyone's getting sick of it.

I think I want what every girl wants in a man. I would like him to be funny, honest, trustworthy. These are the basic qualities that we all look for in a man.

[In my home workshop,] generally I'm mending things, which is interesting because you learn a lot about why they broke.

He says I'm a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.

The heart of a man is like deep water

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

I'm not drawn to stories that are just sort of fluffy. I'm just not, and I've tried to, and as a kid I was never drawn to them. I always chose complicated.

I want a man as nice as my retarded dog, but one that doesn't crap on the floor.