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.

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.

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