Bill Bryson Quotes
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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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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.
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It would be lovely to think I had become a genius,' he smiles, 'but the fact is that I've forgotten most of it. Occasionally I can be watching University Challenge and a stray fact emerges from the recesses of my subconscious that I didn't know I knew, but for the most part I'm as vague on the details as I ever was.
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'Tell me, did they specify ’asshole’ on the job description, or did you take a course?'
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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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We couldn't place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under.
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I don't care how paranoid and irrational this makes me sound, but I know for a fact that the people of Paris want me dead.
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Cheapness is a great virtue.
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I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.
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I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.
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A sign in the yard of a church next door said CHRIST IS THE ANSWER. (The question, of course, is: What do you say when you strike your thumb with a hammer?)
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...Our guide announces that he's going to take us to the coldest place on Earth, where particles are cooled to within a fraction of a Kelvin. 'Ah,' says Bryson. 'That must be Donald Rumsfeld's heart.'
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Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
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America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.
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The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.
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There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
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For forty years or so this was the world headquarters of conspicuous consumption.
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I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.
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I grew up, really, in the days before air conditioning. So I can remember what it was like to be really hot, for instance, and I can remember what it was like when your barber shop and your local stores weren't air conditioned, so it was hot when you went in them and they propped the doors open.
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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 thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well.
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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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Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head. - Katz
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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.