803 Quotes by Bill Bryson

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of teo per cent of the world's population.

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 never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.

When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.

A bank robber in Los Angeles told the clerk not to give him cash, but to deposit the money in his checking account.

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

The biggest attraction in Britain is Britain - the whole package. Our heritage is not just a collection of ornaments scattered across the country, it is Britain itself and makes us gloriously distinguishable from any other country.

You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.