Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson
William McGuire "Bill" Bryson, OBE, FRSis a best-selling Anglo-American author of books on travel, the English language, science, and other non-fiction topics. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to America between 1995 and 2003. He served as the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 December 1951
CityDes Moines, IA
CountryUnited States of America
I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.
Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.
No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.
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.
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.
Cheapness is a great virtue.
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 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 understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.
It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.