Bill Bryson Quotes
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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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For a long time, I'd been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer.
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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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The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well.
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To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.
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Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid.
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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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One of my duties, this week, is to open the new Ustinov college,' he confesses, 'and while I'm delighted that Durham should honour its former chancellor this way - and I sincerely hope it continues this tradition for me - I can't help feeling that an American university would only have done so had the chancellor also handed over a substantial amount of dosh.
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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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They the American authorities can't actually believe that anyone would want to not be an American,' he says. 'It's not enough to send them a letter and tell them you've become British; you've got to go to the embassy to formally renounce your US citizenship. I'm a little worried that when I do this they'll pack me off to Guantanamo.
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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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Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.
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In order to have quality journalism you need to have a good income stream, and no Internet model has produced a way of generating income that would pay for good-quality investigative journalism.
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Personally, I've never been attracted to danger. It's not my sort of thing. I am more attracted to pubs and cafes. The known, safe and comfortable world.
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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.
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I'm not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I'm fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I'm actually quite shy and reserved.
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In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'
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I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.
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There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.
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There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.
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Excuse me, but I just have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.
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I still enjoy traveling a lot. I mean, it amazes me that I still get excited in hotel rooms just to see what kind of shampoo they've left me.
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America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
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Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn't look it, but somehow when you get out there it's really steep and hard.