Quotes from Bill Bryson

Romanians often claim to have the language that most closely resembles ancient Latin. But in fact, according to Mario Pei, if you wish to hear what ancient Latin sounded like, you should listen to Lugudorese, an Italic dialect spoken in central Sardinia, which in many respects is unchanged from the Latin of 1,500 years ago.

I took a place in one of the lines. Progress

I have been told more than once that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to show off the places they had helped to ruin.

This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra—the famous baker's dozen.

I don't want to go and start trying to make jokes in places like India, Tanzania or Iraq. Afghanistan is not a funny place.

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.

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.

Thoreau was an idiot.

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

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

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

Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.

I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

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

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

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.

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

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

Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.