Bill Bryson Quotes
Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls - you don't find a sense of community in malls.
I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.
I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.
Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.
I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.
The human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats.
Yes, U.S. travelers dress better. The British are always so conspicuous in hot climates. They don't seem to wear shorts. American men seem to be comfortable wearing hot-weather clothing.
Beulah has a husband?' I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.
England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.
America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.
Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.
I don't want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.
There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.
I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.
Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.
Most scientists are without exception adorably quirky, and one of the ways of making it more accessible was to try to get readers interested in the person.
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.
I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research - to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book.
One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.
The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.
Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...
I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel.
The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it.
The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally.
If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.
