Quotes from Bill Bryson

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.

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

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

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.'

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. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

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

You can be a scientist and believe in god: the two can go hand in hand.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

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

Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.

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

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

I hadn't realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for me.