Happy Birthday, Bill Bryson, born 8 December 1951.
Bill Bryson: Nine Quotes
- 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.
- 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.
- More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.
- The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population.
- Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
- Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of ‘prior to’. To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use ‘posterior to’ instead of ‘after’, then by all means use ‘prior to’ instead of ‘before’.
- That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.
- Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.
- Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earth’s history.
Bill Bryson is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, the English language, and science. He lived in England for most of his adult life before returning to the US in 1995. In 2003 he moved back to Britain and was appointed Chancellor of Durham University. Bryson is well-known for many books, including Notes from a Small Island, Notes from A Big Country, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
Source for Image
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neil_MacGregor,_Bill_Bryson,_Claire_Walker,_Huw_Edwards_(28449155987)_(Bryson_cropped).jpg
The National Churches Trust from London, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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0 thoughts on “Literary Birthday – 8 December – Bill Bryson”
Found this post doing a Google+ search because I was looking for people born on December 8th. Happy brithday, Mr. Bryson. He looks like a jolly old chap, doesn’t he?
I love books, stories, literature heals the mind.