Bill Bryson's Quotes

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.

I'm not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I'm fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I'm actually quite shy and reserved.

I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. 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.

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.

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.

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.

In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'

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.

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.

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

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.

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.

There'd never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition. At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States - alcohol production - and just handed it to criminals - a pretty remarkable thing to do.

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.

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.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

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

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.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

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

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn't for 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.

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

England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

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.

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

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 see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.

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.

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.

I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.

I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.

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

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

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