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. – Bill Bryson
I’m not funny in person. I mean I’m really not. I’m one of those people who always screw up anecdotes. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can’t make your children carry. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
I want things to be better all the time. And I tend to get angry about that. Books are an opportunity to vent. – Bill Bryson
I’m a great believer that you had to do everything you’ve done to have got to where you are. – Bill Bryson
I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
Book tours are really kind of fun. You get to stay in nice hotels, you are driven everywhere in big silver cars, you are treated as if you are much more important than you are, you can eat steak three times a day at someone else’s expense, and you get to talk endlessly about yourself for weeks at a stretch. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
I could give you a long list of things I like about Britain, but essentially what it comes down to is that I feel about Britain the same way I feel about my wife. I’m crazy about my wife – we just kind of suit each other. I wouldn’t say that she’s the most fantastic human being that’s ever lived, but she is for me. – Bill Bryson
Personally, I’ve never been attracted to danger. It’s not my sort of thing. I am more attracted to pubs and cafes. The known, safe and comfortable world. – Bill Bryson
We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100 watt light bulb. – Bill Bryson
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can’t go home again. – Bill Bryson
More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
Science has been quite embattled. It’s the most important thing there is. An arts graduate is not going to fix global warming. They may do other valuable things, but they are not going to fix the planet or cure cancer or get rid of malaria. – Bill Bryson
The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population. – Bill Bryson
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
Des Moines is like your typical American city; it’s just these concentric circles of malls, built outward from the city. – Bill Bryson
Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It’s so bad that you think he’s going to announce in a minute that it’s all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady. – Bill Bryson
Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains. – Bill Bryson
I always tell people there’s only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn’t have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it. – Bill Bryson
When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression. – Bill Bryson