bill bryson:here nor there/ a sense of place

a sense of place:

Shapiro: ...but the other thing is that Seinfeld had a bit about the show being about nothing. Now I mean this in the most complimentary way: Is there a similar thread in your work?

I have a kind of travel I do which is very limited. I'm a motel traveler. And if you have a really successful book, then you get really pigeon-holed because publishers want you to do the exact same book, part two.

One of the things I find most gratifying about what I do is once you really get into a subject you reach a point where you're almost insatiable in your curiosity. You just want to know more.

...I really like the idea of setting off and just walking. I'm pretty sure that I'll never tire of that.

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and recieving a large unexpected check in the mail, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset...

All human beings do essentially the same things everywhere on the planet. We all eat and drink and procreate and watch a little TV in the evening. And yet, there's such a variety of ways in doing these things. And I love that.

I don't think travel is the least bit broadening unless you want it to be.

Part of the reason English is such a great language for humor is that there are so many opportunites for puns. Words have so many different meanings and how you arrange them is particularly fruitful in that way.


Neither Here Nor There:

Hammerfest

...I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself a source of merriment for the world, and I had come close to scaling new heights with a Russian hat.

Sometimes I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees and just gazed about me. Often I talked to myself. Mostly I went for long, cold, walks...

Oslo

I don't want to know what people are talking about...Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

"And you have sex with all these creatures, do you?" the host was saying.

Paris

In halting french you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter.

Brussels

I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, "You want to go where?" The center of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is Lille, you dumb shit."

Belgium

I did just that and never once saw a street I wouldn't want to live on, a bar I wouldn't like to get to know, a view I wouldn't wish to call my own.