Top 60 Bill Bryson Quotes

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

I once joked in a book that there are three things you can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.

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.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

Very little of what America does is actually bad, and I don’t think it ever does anything anywhere that is intentionally bad. I mean, sometimes we make mistakes and bad judgments and kind of back the wrong regimes and things, but by and large what America does is really good.

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.

I’ve been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don’t tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

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.

I understand cricket – what’s going on, the scoring – but I can’t understand why.

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.

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.

Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

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

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.

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.

Nobody gets excited about the future at all, ever. The future is something we find depressing and worrisome.

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.

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don’t find a sense of community in malls.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

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.

If you go out on the Appalachian Trail, you have to bring so much more equipment – a tent, sleeping bag – but if you go hiking in England, or Europe, generally, towns and villages are near enough together at the end of the day you can always go to a nice little inn and have a hot bath and something to drink.

Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria.

I’m a great believer that you had to do everything you’ve done to have got to where you are.

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.

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.

I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Bronte.

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

I sometimes think I cannot write another passage about a disappointing meal ever again, because I’ve done it so many times.

I’ve never quite understood that feeling: that you arrive in a strange place, yet you want to have nothing but familiar experiences.

I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.

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.

I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.

I would make a genuinely terrible guide. I can’t remember things. I would get half way through telling a story or explaining something and I would get distracted. Oh, and I have absolutely no sense of direction at all.

Book tours are really kind of fun. You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much more important than you are, you can eat steak three times a day at someone else’s expense, and you get to talk endlessly about yourself for weeks at a stretch.

I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did – all of these peoples’ lives went on.

I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.

Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do.

In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It’s no accident that the ‘Book-of-the-Month Club’ and ‘The Literary Guild’ were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like ‘Reader’s Digest,’ ‘Time,’ and ‘The New Yorker.’

England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

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.

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.

I often feel I’m a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I’m not at all.

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.

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.

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

I always tell people there’s only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn’t have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.

I could give you a long list of things I like about Britain, but essentially what it comes down to is that I feel about Britain the same way I feel about my wife. I’m crazy about my wife – we just kind of suit each other. I wouldn’t say that she’s the most fantastic human being that’s ever lived, but she is for me.

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.

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.

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

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.

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.