Quotes from Bill Bryson

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

The world is very lucky to have America. It's got to be the first time in the whole history of the planet that a country has been the dominant force in the world and it has actually been a force for good... America really deserves more credit.

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

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

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

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.

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.