Quotes About Bill Bryson

we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because

If you are going to have a system of hereditary privilege, then surely you have to take what comes your way no matter how ponderous the poor fellow may be or how curious his taste in mistresses.

camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning "to blow smoke up someone's nose," a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French)

This is the worst characteristic of the Germans. Well, actually a predilection for starting land wars in Europe is their worst characteristic, but this is right up there with it.

interesting? And here's another interesting fact, which I didn't tell you about earlier because I've been saving it: Wyatt Earp was from Pella, the little Iowa town with the windmills. Isn't that great?

certainty. The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful

passed a public library and impulsively popped in to ask if they had any information on Centralia.

A lot of people conclude from this that the FBI and its agents are dangerously inept.

the favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again)

the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

and do you know the difference, by the way, between village and hamlet? It's quite simple, really: One is a place where people live and the other is a play by Shakespeare)

There is something in what he said. English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.

the famous jack-o-lantern mushroom, which glows at night with a greenish phosphorescent ligh called foxfire.

In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records.

Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy's house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose.

his facetious grace in writing," and much else.

In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life's small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.

They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie." "For breakfast?" "No, for lunch and dinner. But it's not a pie at all, it's a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it." "Sounds dreadful.

Thoreau was an idiot.

Bill Bryson's is a synthesizing intellect, capable of translating myriad data into a digestible narrative – rare currency in an increasingly atomized society.

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.