Bill Bryson Quotes

Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.

In the work of the greatest geniuses, humble beginnings will reveal themselves somewhere, but one cannot trace the slightest sign of them in Shakespeare ... I am not concerned with who wrote the works of Shakespeare ... but I can hardly think it was the Stratford boy. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude.

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.

You don't think anything about age when you're playing [golf]. I mean, why would you ever think about that.

Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare.

If the soul has food for study and learning, nothing is more delightful than an old age of leisure.

I expect to play golf until I am 90-even longer if anybody figures out a way to swing a club from a rocking chair.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

You know what is a nice thought? Retirement.

By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many douceurs in being a sort of chaperon , for I am put on the sofa near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like.

Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did.

Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.

Retirement without literary amusements is death itself, and a living tomb.

Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.

Intoxication is calculated to put heart into the elderly and give them delight in dancing.

There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.

As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved.

I'm just waiting to be 85 and be in a pajama community. Everyone's welcome to join me.

After a long day, folk rest at night. After a long summer, folk play games and sit about in the winter. After a long life folk sit about the fire and stay warm, for the chill of death is upon them, and even the thickest bearskin can't keep off the shivering.

Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher

An old man drinks tea and reads the newspaper--forgetting age for a moment.

As you get older, you have more time on your hands. Some people do croswords and others jigsaws, but I garden.