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"The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more."
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"A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me."
"If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be."
"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."
"It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it."
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while."
"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts."
"A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson
"If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be."
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
"A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things."
"The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population."
"It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before."
"What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit..."
"The author reveals a cultural change that took place when clergy were paid based on a tax on the land's value rather than what it produced. This meant that, while parishioners could suffer through a terrible year, clergy would always have a comfortable one."
"Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity."
"It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own."
"They were Republicans, Nixon Republicans, and so didn't subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally."
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