Quotes by Bill Bryson

About Bill Bryson:

William McGuire is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and science. Born in the United States, he was a resident of Britain for most of his adult life before returning to America in 1995. In 2003 Bryson and his wife and four children moved back to Britain, living in the old rectory of Wramplingham, Norfolk, and he served as chancellor of Durham University from 2005 through 2011.
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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

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

Bill Bryson

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

Bill Bryson

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don't want to live with them.

Bill Bryson

I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did - all of these peoples' lives went on.

Bill Bryson

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.

Bill Bryson

The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4....

Bill Bryson

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do ...

Bill Bryson

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Bill Bryson

It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.

Bill Bryson

The current best estimate for the Earth’s weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish’s finding.

Bill Bryson

Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity

Bill Bryson

The whole system was based upon getting kids to a certain standard and packing their minds with information so they could go on to a good university ... The great failure in education, much of the time, is a lack of excitement and stimulus.

Bill Bryson

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a pe...

Bill Bryson

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms...

Bill Bryson

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

Bill Bryson

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes ...

Bill Bryson

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years...

Bill Bryson

I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.

Bill Bryson

Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do.

Bill Bryson

Author Bio

  • NameBill Bryson
  • DescriptionAmerican author
  • BornDecember 8, 1951
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist; Travel Writer; Autobiographer; Science Writer; Popularizer Of Science
  • AwardsOfficer Of The Order Of The British Empire; Zilveren Griffel