Bill Bryson Quotes
-
One of the brilliant things about Britain is the way you've managed to save old things but to keep using them - that they've not just become museums the way they do in the United States.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It would be a great abuse of my position to write that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shoddy and inexcusable way, so I won't.
-
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.
-
Absolute brain size does not tell you everything - or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn't have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.
-
If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way.
-
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb.
-
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
-
All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.
-
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.
-
The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.
-
I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
-
An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.
-
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 any area of human endeavour, there is going to be mediocrity. You're going to find people who get money that they shouldn't get.
-
The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.
-
The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me; it's anybody who's funny.
-
I relaxed my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely pratty as to put 'Ph.D.' after his name (I don't put Ph.D. after my name on my books, after all - and not just because I don't have one).
-
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.
-
I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.
-
I'd turn on the lights, but they're blown. I'd offer you a seat, but there isn't one. I'd offer you a drink from the minibar, but there doesn't appear to be one.' 'It certainly is basic.' 'Basic? It's a bloody cell!
-
My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.
-
Above all, what is oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren't there.