Bill Bryson

Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.

Excuse me, but I have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.

I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.

I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

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

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.

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

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.