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"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."
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"We write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are."
"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
"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."
"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
"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."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson
"Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
"And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere."
"When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on."
"There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age."
"Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it."
"The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know."
"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."
"There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person."
"It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time."
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