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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Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the ...

Bill Bryson

Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.

Bill Bryson

If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.

Bill Bryson

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we mig...

Bill Bryson

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

Bill Bryson

This was 1990 the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism nev...

Bill Bryson

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, "We all do.

Bill Bryson

I sat on a toilet watching the water run thinking what an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile effort to recapture the c...

Bill Bryson

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost ...

Bill Bryson

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

Bill Bryson

I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you im...

Bill Bryson

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think ...

Bill Bryson

Even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn't hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hotdogs.

Bill Bryson

Tunney has all the makings of a hero – he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking – but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.

Bill Bryson

It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.

Bill Bryson

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether, very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distraction of radio, but for the moment reading remained the people's principle method for filli...

Bill Bryson

The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.

Bill Bryson

As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?

Bill Bryson

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Bill Bryson

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.

Bill Bryson

[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would ...

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