Quotes About Bill Bryson

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

I thought Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

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.

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.

My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.

Most recently I read Michael Lewis "Boomerang." The other guy I love is Bill Bryson.

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.

and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without the benefit of metal.

Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered.

I had a hangover you could sell to science

The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

Thoreau was an idiot.

Among the tiny atomic structures the plankton take to the grave with them are two very stable isotopes—oxygen-16 and oxygen-18.

History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that 'once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come38'. He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism.

Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.

untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," still known as Parkinson's Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore.

Buffon's observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especially those whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country.

McDonald Observatory in Texas

Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subsequent writings.