Bill Bryson Quotes
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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.
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If you go out on the Appalachian Trail, you have to bring so much more equipment - a tent, sleeping bag - but if you go hiking in England, or Europe, generally, towns and villages are near enough together at the end of the day you can always go to a nice little inn and have a hot bath and something to drink.
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In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
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I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.
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A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.
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I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.
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All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
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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.
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I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.
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Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don't think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.
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Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats.
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England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.
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Anyone who has read my books will know that I don't tend to use guides when I am travelling. It's not a pride thing, but it is certainly a fact.
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My wife ... recently put me on a diet after suggesting (a little unkindly, if you ask me), that I was beginning to look like something Richard Branson would try to get airborne.
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Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.
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In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.
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I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
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I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.
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Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
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I once joked in a book that there are three things you can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
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I could give you a long list of things I like about Britain, but essentially what it comes down to is that I feel about Britain the same way I feel about my wife. I'm crazy about my wife - we just kind of suit each other. I wouldn't say that she's the most fantastic human being that's ever lived, but she is for me.
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I often feel I'm a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I'm not at all.
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I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did - all of these peoples' lives went on.
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I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.