When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
BILL BRYSONWhen you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.
BILL BRYSONOn the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well,
BILL BRYSONMost scientists are without exception adorably quirky, and one of the ways of making it more accessible was to try to get readers interested in the person.
BILL BRYSONIt is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.
BILL BRYSONEvery last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers.
BILL BRYSONGermans 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.
BILL BRYSONAs the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn’t go quite so far around it as others.
BILL BRYSONBeulah has a husband?’ I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.
BILL BRYSONThis much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir.
BILL BRYSONThere’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition.
BILL BRYSONThere is more difference between a zebra and a horse, or between a dolphin and a porpoise, than there is between you and the furry creatures your distant ancestors left behind when they set out to take over the world.
BILL BRYSONMy favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions.
BILL BRYSONAmerica is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.
BILL BRYSONEverything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.
BILL BRYSONThe human diet consists of just nine plants: corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye and oats.
BILL BRYSONTo me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.
BILL BRYSON