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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that’s not Des Moines. – Bill Bryson
In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not. – Bill Bryson
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. – Bill Bryson
I hadn’t realized quite how extraordinary Charles Lindbergh’s achievement was in flying the Atlantic alone. He had never flown over open water before, but he flew straight to Dingle Bay in Ireland and then on to Paris, exactly as planned. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
Nobody gets excited about the future at all, ever. The future is something we find depressing and worrisome. – Bill Bryson
You don’t need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it. – Bill Bryson
I sometimes think I cannot write another passage about a disappointing meal ever again, because I’ve done it so many times. – Bill Bryson
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. – 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. Since the spring of 1995, I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three. – Bill Bryson
An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows… We’re reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa – just kind of open space. – Bill Bryson
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.’ – Bill Bryson
In any area of human endeavour, there is going to be mediocrity. You’re going to find people who get money that they shouldn’t get. – Bill Bryson
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age. – Bill Bryson
I often feel I’m a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I’m not at all. – Bill Bryson
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
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. – Bill Bryson
For a long time, I’d been vaguely fascinated by the idea that Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in the same summer. – Bill Bryson
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being. – Bill Bryson
I grew up, really, in the days before air conditioning. So I can remember what it was like to be really hot, for instance, and I can remember what it was like when your barber shop and your local stores weren’t air conditioned, so it was hot when you went in them and they propped the doors open. – Bill Bryson
