Bill Bryson
Best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on scientific subjects.
Why, it's a perfect little city. If you have never been to Durham, go there at once. Take my car. It's wonderful.
Just down the road stood a little town, which I shall call Dullard lest the people recognize themselves and take me to court or come to my house and batter me with baseball bats.
I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored. But then it occurred to me that musing is a pointless waste of anyone's time, and instead I went off to see if I could find a Baby Ruth candy bar, a far more profitable exercise.
All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
It would be lovely to think I had become a genius," he smiles, "but the fact is that I've forgotten most of it. Occasionally I can be watching University Challenge and a stray fact emerges from the recesses of my subconscious that I didn't know I knew, but for the most part I'm as vague on the details as I ever was.
"Virginia?" he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a dose of syphilis.
When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a girl called Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can't wait to get out and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbie and get a job in the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.
There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.
I had also got used to the idea that here [in the UK] you can make quips all the time and in America that can be very dangerous. I wrote about it in one of the books. Once I was going through customs and immigration in Boston, and the guy said as I went past "Any fruit or vegetables?" and I said "OK, I'll have four pounds of potatoes if they are fresh" and it was like he was going to take me off and pin me to the floor.
Excuse me, but I have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.
Wow, look at all the places you can park,” he said, as if for all these years he had been cruising endlessly, unable to terminate a journey. For about a year the most dangerous place to drive in Des Moines was the parking lot of Merle Hay Mall because of all the cars speeding at joyous random angles across its boundless blacktop without reflecting that other happy souls might be doing likewise.
There was a lot more joking going on when I was a kid. My dad, for instance, specialised in puns and I remember once we were on vacation in California and we were driving along the San Andreas Fault and he threw a quarter out of the window into the Fault because he said "he had always wanted to be generous to a fault".
I have always wanted to know why, wherever archaeologists dig, do they always find red and white poles?
I had to calm down because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking at me with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car.
But what is life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours — arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.
I can tell you that tonight in Des Moines, Iowa, my home town, people all across the city will be putting a hand to their ears and saying "What is that sound?", and it will be the sound of Mr De Vito, my High School Careers Officer, spinning in his grave.
One of my duties, this week, is to open the new Ustinov college," he confesses, "and while I'm delighted that Durham should honour its former chancellor this way — and I sincerely hope it continues this tradition for me — I can't help feeling that an American university would only have done so had the chancellor also handed over a substantial amount of dosh.
Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain.
My wife [...] recently put me on a diet after suggesting (a little unkindly, if you ask me), that I was beginning to look like something Richard Branson would try to get airborne.