Bill Bryson

"What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless."

"She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude."

"It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you."

"On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: 'I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun."

"One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing."

"The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand."

"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."