Bill Bryson Quotes

Des Moines is like your typical American city; it's just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

My mother only ever said two things. She said,'I don't know, dear.'And she said,'Can I get you a sandwich, honey?

... it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.

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.

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks.

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.

Traveling is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

He had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humor.

The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.

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.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.

The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: "I say, is that a sn--

Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.

The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

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.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

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.

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.

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?)

I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

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.

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.

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.