Bill Bryson Quotes

It was totally different. I am living in Sao Paulo and then I'm in Ukraine living in a small city called Donetsk. There's the weather, the language. I went there with my family. That helped a little bit and I ended up staying there for five-and-a-half years. It was important there that I had so many Brazilian players.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth.

My mum and dad were speaking all the time about, 'In Sudan we do this,' and 'In Egypt we do that,' so I was very aware of cultural differences. I was confused growing up; it gave me a feeling of being an outsider watching others. But I think this is good for a writer.

I couldn't really take a girl from Berlin to live in Leeds. I love it here. I miss the Yorkshire sense of humor and things like bitter and Yorkshire puddings, but I can still get my hands on salt 'n' vinegar crisps.

When I was in Taiwan, we were there for about 8 months, and I was 11 at the time, so it was definitely a culture shock. But it was a really interesting time to be there. I didn't entirely realize how different it is from the States. I just accepted it because I was there and my parents needed to be there.

New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications.

When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley, I had some misgivings. But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood. And, in fact, some advantages to owning your own media company. And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed.

When you go to a new country, you don't have the same facilities as you had in the one before. You adapt very quickly to the circumstances.

I remember, when I arrived in England, a lot of people said that my style of play was not for England.

When I came to England, everyone told me that I'd get the hits, so I was prepared for that.

Eventually, I gave up my sublet in Berlin and stayed in England for a long time - for about 20 years.

Moving to France is not the hard part. Living here is more difficult. Of course there are many benefits but it's not always easy especially if you don't speak the language.

I never really thought of myself as somebody to move abroad. It just came on my path.

I don't know if I can handle living in Tokyo. I feel like the culture shock would be so intense, especially with the service industry in America - you can't make up for that. Once you get a chance to travel a lot, you start to realize when that waitress comes back and asks you if you want some more to drink, that's an important moment. Nobody else does that!

My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don't have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there.

I do think that when you're specifically working in a country like South Africa, you have to be able to be aware of the cultural truth of what people are raised in and believe in and how they function within their society.

I moved from Italy to Oregon in the '80s - sort of like moving to the middle of a "Duck Dynasty" episode, which was massive culture shock to say the least.

The political structure in different countries has different origins, different developments. Something which suits one country extremely well would perhaps fail completely in another. Germany, through the long centuries of monarchy, has always had a leadership principle. ... The position of the Catholic Church rests now, as before, on the clear leadership principle of its hierarchy. And I think I can also say that of Russia, too.

America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home.

Philosophers, comedians, and tipsy birthday celebrants all have proposed theories about why time seems to move increasingly swiftly as we grow older. But the most disconcerting rationale is not a theory. It is the undeniable realization that every day we live constitutes a smaller percentage of the accrued experience with which we awaken each morning, and therefore seems proportionately a smidgen quicker and smaller than the day before.

I was in Las Vegas when the Nogueira brothers first touched down in America. There was a bus, this is a true story. There was a bus that pulled up to a red light, and Little Nog tried to feed it a carrot, while Big Nog was petting it. He thought it was a horse. This really happened. He tried to feed a bus a carrot, and now you're telling me this country has computers? I didn't know that.

I know how hard it can be to communicate in a different country, find your way around, and deal with the mentality of other people and different cultures.

The same image that I have of all the countries where I am supposed to go: it's far, it's different, it will be necessarily complicated ... It's another part of the world for me coming [from] the United States.

While learning the language in France a young man's morals, health and fortune are more irresistibly endangered than in any country of the universe.