Bill Bryson Quotes
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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.
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For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.
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I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.
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The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.
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Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
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Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It's so bad that you think he's going to announce in a minute that it's all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady.
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There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
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The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
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There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
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I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things.
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When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
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I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.
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The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
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I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.
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Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz
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America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.
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I sometimes think I cannot write another passage about a disappointing meal ever again, because I've done it so many times.
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The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well.
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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.
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A friend Alan and I ended up in an Outback pub in a place called Daly Waters and apparently, he says, in the course of this very lively evening we spent there I offered to do a house swap with a family from Korea. We weren't sure whether they were from North Korea or South Korea.
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Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid.
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I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.
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There was a lot more joking going on when I was a kid. My dad, for instance, specialised in puns and I remember once we were on vacation in California and we were driving along the San Andreas Fault and he threw a quarter out of the window into the Fault because he said 'he had always wanted to be generous to a fault'.
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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.