Quote

I come from Des Moines. Someone had to.

Bill Bryson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Bill Bryson
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 8
Author
Autobiographer
Journalist
Science Communicator
Science Writer
Travel Writer
Writer
Des Moines
Iowa
William Bryson
William Bill McGuire Bryson
William McGuire Bryson
Come
Moines
Someone

More quotes by Bill Bryson

Image
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
Image
Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.
Bill Bryson
Image
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
Bill Bryson
Image
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.
Bill Bryson
Image
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
Image
The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn't just common to me it's anybody who's funny.
Bill Bryson
Image
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.
Bill Bryson
Image
Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.
Bill Bryson
Image
You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.
Bill Bryson
Image
I can wear a baseball cap I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.
Bill Bryson
Image
There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.
Bill Bryson
Image
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
Image
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 comforts you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.
Bill Bryson
Image
I'm not funny in person. I mean I'm really not. I'm one of those people who always screw up anecdotes.
Bill Bryson
Image
Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.
Bill Bryson
Image
In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.
Bill Bryson
Image
Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn't happen often, but - and here is the absolutely salient point - once would be enough.
Bill Bryson
Image
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.
Bill Bryson
Image
I'm quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket were left in Australian hands, within a generation, the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other, and the thing is, it'd be a much better game for it.
Bill Bryson
Image
Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.
Bill Bryson