Bill Bryson

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

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

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

I wasn't one of the cool kids by any stretch. I just bumbled along really.

I generally don't follow domestic news that much aside from how it relates to the stories I'm covering abroad, like what Americans think of the War in Afghanistan.