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
Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.
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...
It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.
It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright
America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.
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.
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 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.
Scientists tend to be unappreciated in the world at large, but you can hardly overstate the importance of the work they do.
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.
I like to do books in which a lot of the research and the writing and the thinking revolves around something American.
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.
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.