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.

As the mother of a grown son with a traumatic brain injury, I couldn't be more excited about the prospect of finding out how to repair even a small part of the damage that changed his life.

I had siblings from South Asia, from East Asia, from depressed communities around America, and you know, we'd have long conversations.

It took me realizing that a broken heart has never actually killed anyone to find the courage to ask for what I want, in just about every situation. That was part of my own growing up.