Quotes from Bill Bryson

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.

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.

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

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

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.

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.

The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me; it's anybody who's funny.

I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent.

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 plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

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.

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.

Cheapness is a great virtue.

The great failure in education, much of the time, is the lack of excitement and stimulus

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose

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