Quotes from Bill Bryson

I grew up, really, in the days before air conditioning. So I can remember what it was like to be really hot, for instance, and I can remember what it was like when your barber shop and your local stores weren't air conditioned, so it was hot when you went in them and they propped the doors open.

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

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.

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.

Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

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.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

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

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.

Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines.

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.

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 was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.

I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.

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.

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.

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.

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.

I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.

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

The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

[A]nd then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

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