Adams, Douglas (Douglas Adams)

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

-- Douglas Adams

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
-- Douglas Adams

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

-- Douglas Adams

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
-- Douglas Adams

Ah yes," he said, "that's to do with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum< to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better."

It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilzation in which I could live and stay sane.
-- Douglas Adams

I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I'll show you something to demonstrate that later. So the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool.
-- Douglas Adams

An S.E.P.,' he said, 'is something that we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That's what S.E.P. means. Somebody Else's problem. The brain just edits it out; it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.
-- Douglas Adams

When I was growing up, the question was: who's going to be in charge? Everyone assumed it would be Big Brother, the government. But we all know that's not the case -- we're in charge.

-- Douglas Adams

[Adams] praised the Apache [server] audience for providing the tools for true democratization, loosening powers from large institutions -- like governments and multinational corporations -- and placing power back in the hands of the people. This allows good ideas to rise from the bottom, rather than be imposed on the masses from the top.
-- Douglas Adams

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.

-- Douglas Adams

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

-- Douglas Adams

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable... There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

-- Douglas Adams

The thing he realized about the windows was this: because they had been converted into openable windows after they had first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows in the first place.

-- Douglas Adams

"You're very strange", she said.

-- Douglas Adams

It's rather like a puddle waking up one morning. I know they don't normally do this, but allow me, I'm a science fiction writer. A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: "This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly... I mean really precise isn't it?... It must have been made to have me in it." And the sun rises, and it's continuing to narrate this story about how this hole must have been made to have him in it. And as the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking - and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it's still thinking - it's still trapped in this idea that - that the hole was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us we will continue to destroy it in the way that we have been destroying it, because we think that we can do no harm.
-- Douglas Adams

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
-- Douglas Adams

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

-- Douglas Adams

A nerd is someone who uses a telephone to talk to other people about telephones.
-- Douglas Adams

It takes an awful long time to not write a book.
-- Douglas Adams

Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in...
-- Douglas Adams

They believe in `peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms'.

-- Douglas Adams

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
-- Douglas Adams

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
-- Douglas Adams

We all like to congregate At boundary conditions. Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be on one side, and look at the other.
-- Douglas Adams

The point is, you see," said Ford, "that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later."
-- Douglas Adams

I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana...
-- Douglas Adams

From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields.
-- Douglas Adams

This was definitely the Earth. Or rather, it most definitely was not. It merely looked a lot like the Earth and occupied the same co-ordinates in space-time. What co-ordinates it occupied in Probability was anybody's guess.
-- Douglas Adams

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. "For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?
-- Douglas Adams

He felt the way he imagined an angel must feel during its celebrated dance on the head of a pin whilst being counted by philosophers.
-- Douglas Adams

"Drink up." He added, perfectly factually: "The world's about to end."
-- Douglas Adams

"O, sandwich maker from Bob!" He pronounced. He paused and furrowed his brow with pious contemplation. "Life will be a very great deal less weird without you!"

Arthur was stunned. "Do you know," he said "I think that's the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me."
-- Douglas Adams

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.
-- Douglas Adams

You'll have to excuse me. I just hitched from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula.
-- Douglas Adams

She'd been born in a spaceship that had been going from somewhere to somewhere else, and when it had got to somewhere else, somewhere else had only turned out to be another somewhere that you had to get to somewhere else again from, and so on. It was her normal expectation that she was supposed to be somewhere else. It was normal for her to feel that she was in the wrong place.
-- Douglas Adams

He didn't suppose, of course, that the warranty had especially mentioned that the watch was guaranteed to be accurate only within the very particular gravitational and magnetic fields of the Earth, and so long as the day was twenty-four hours long and the planet didn't explode and so on. These were such basic assumptions that even the lawyers would have missed them.
-- Douglas Adams

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting.
-- Douglas Adams

He was stranded in prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence of events which had involved him being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he ever dreamt existed.
-- Douglas Adams

I don't know. I've never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears.
-- Douglas Adams

There's a good chance that the structure of the question is encoded in the structure of your brain - so we want to buy it off you.
-- Douglas Adams

The history of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure, and enormously long lunchbreaks.
-- Douglas Adams

The editor, like all the editors of the Guide has ever had, has no real grasp of the meanings of the words "scrupulous", "conscientious" or "diligent", and tends to get his nightmares through a straw.
-- Douglas Adams

We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong.
-- Douglas Adams


-- Douglas Adams

Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped from the tv and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch.
-- Douglas Adams

You get one of those supermarket trolleys which simply will not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy completely different stuff.
-- Douglas Adams

Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space. That's because of the filters through which you perceive it. But I was built with no filters at all, which means I perceive the mish mash which contains all possible universes but which has, itself, no size at all. For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient and omnipotent, extremely vain, and, what is more, I come in a handy self-carrying package. You have to work out how much of the above is true.
-- Douglas Adams

"I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy," insisted Zaphod, rising himself up on to his shoulders, "but I have the mother and father of a pair of headaches, and I feel a lot of little headaches coming on. But next time it needs saving, I'm your guy."
-- Douglas Adams

He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to his department head.

"Rightyho."
-- Douglas Adams

For some time it had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked out at their own world beneath them, with its wrecked cities, its ravaged avocado farms and blighted vineyards, its vast tracts of new desert, its seas full of biscuit crumbs and worse, that their world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as much fun as it had been.
-- Douglas Adams

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.
-- Douglas Adams

The Galaxy, which had been enjoying a period of unusual peace and prosperity at the time, reeled like a man getting mugged in a meadow.
-- Douglas Adams

The Question I would like to know is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know is that the Answer is Forty-Two, which is a little aggravating.
-- Douglas Adams

"I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."
-- Douglas Adams

'How can I tell,' said the man, 'that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?'
-- Douglas Adams

She wished she knew what it was she was trying not to think about.
-- Douglas Adams

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
-- Douglas Adams

Much had been heard - more grindings and rumblings from deep within the craft, the music of a million hideous malfunctions.
-- Douglas Adams

"It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what's that strange thing you British play?"

"Parliamentary democracy," said Gail. "The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves."
-- Douglas Adams

But it takes an awful long time to not write a book!
-- Douglas Adams

'On [the robot's] world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.'

-- Douglas Adams

Don't Panic
-- Douglas Adams

A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'

-- Douglas Adams

Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, everything else in life becomes eerily easy.
-- Douglas Adams

The Electric Monk was a labour saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
-- Douglas Adams


-- Douglas Adams

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.
-- Douglas Adams

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
-- Douglas Adams

It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

-- Douglas Adams

It'd be like a bunch of rivers, the Amazon and the Mississippi and the Congo asking how the Atlantic Ocean might affect them… and the answer is of course is that they won't be rivers anymore, just currents in the ocean.
-- Douglas Adams

It's important to remember that the relationship between different media tends to be complementary. When new media arrive they don't necessarily replace or eradicate previous types. Though we should perhaps observe a half second silence for the eight-track. - There that's done. What usually happens is that older media have to shuffle about a bit to make space for the new one and its particular advantages. Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?
-- Douglas Adams

Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.
-- Douglas Adams

Internet music? Well...oh....um.... I would - its an impossible question but an interesting topic! I think we need to find much simpler and straightforward ways of handling intellectual property on the web by which I mean finding ways by which people can pay small amounts easily and quickly for music, books and so on. And at that point I think we will get through the current battles and logjams that are caused by the fact that there is a huge gap between cost of a cd or a book which tends to be in the £10 -20 range and the cost of downloading a piece of music which is zero.I think there is a happy mean achievable which will mean that artists get properly recorded and music fans will be able to get music for much less than they currently pay for cds.
-- Douglas Adams

Question-from Linsey > What do you believe will make the most impact in the next 10 - 20 years in the area of IT/Communications? Douglas Adams > I think mobile information
-- Douglas Adams

I think that radio is in a very um... interesting position at the moment because right now it is possible to deliver radio over the web in ways that it is still very difficult to deliver TV, it's just a question of bandwidth and of experimenting in all kind of ways in which it can make use of um... the web for finding new audiences and new material to give them.
-- Douglas Adams

Question-from Mick Carter > What do you think of the Open Source movement? Douglas Adams > I'm torn. On the one hand I see and understand all the arguments in its favour and think that they're very powerful as somebody who's a committed evolutionist and a bottom-up designer I feel that it's the right way to go on the other hand, I really love my macintosh! I have not found a way of reconciling these positions.
-- Douglas Adams

Question-from John C Scott> Vast amounts of information can travel from one point to another with very little resistance. Will this result in a cultural uniformity as we each become subject to the same information? How will cultural distinctiveness be retained? Douglas Adams > That's a big question! Um... I think that ease of travel tends to create alot of uniformity I think that ease of communication mediated by the computer tends to nurture diversity that certainly seems to be the lesson that the web is teaching us at the moment
-- Douglas Adams

Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.

-- Douglas Adams

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

-- Douglas Adams

A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.

-- Douglas Adams

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

-- Douglas Adams

Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.

-- Douglas Adams

Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get *there*. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.

-- Douglas Adams

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

-- Douglas Adams

Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were REAL small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged.

-- Douglas Adams

This planet has... a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

-- Douglas Adams

You know, it's at times like this when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young!

-- Douglas Adams

If you want to survive in life, you've got to know where your towel is.

-- Douglas Adams

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted...

-- Douglas Adams

Why do we need to think? Can't we just sit here and go BLBLBLBLBLB with our lips for a bit?

-- Douglas Adams

Some creatures that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but then creatures that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinions can and SHOULD be discluded.

-- Douglas Adams

Anything that happens, happens.

-- Douglas Adams

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, 'as pretty as an airport.' Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.

-- Douglas Adams

"My name is Kate Schechter. Two 'c's, two 'h's, two 'e's, and also a 't', an 'r', and an 's'. Provided they're all there the bank won't be fussy about the order they come in."

-- Douglas Adams

It was a battered yellow Citroen 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones.

-- Douglas Adams

Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila.

-- Douglas Adams

Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.

-- Douglas Adams

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

-- Douglas Adams

It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

-- Douglas Adams

Dirk was unused to making such a minuscule impact on anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway. He felt momentarily deflated and said, "Er..." by way of self-introduction, but it didn't get the boy's attention. He didn't like this. The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him.

-- Douglas Adams

"A suffusion of yellow." (A calculator's response to the question of any math problem with an answer larger than four.)

-- Douglas Adams

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.

-- Douglas Adams

The Great Zaganza said: "You are very fat and stupid and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should be ashamed of."

-- Douglas Adams

I've heard an idea proposed, I've no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It's an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying "Jump!" and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, "For Christ's sake, don't!" In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!

-- Douglas Adams

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.

-- Douglas Adams

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.

-- Douglas Adams

We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphising animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn't fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behaviour was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human.

-- Douglas Adams

I didn't notice I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals.

-- Douglas Adams

(..) I say roughly, because the gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency declaration forms, and official bribery, and tend to wander backwards and forwards across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them.

-- Douglas Adams

The kakapo's persnickety dietary requirements are a whole other area of exasperating difficulty. It makes me tired just to think of them, so I think we'll pass quickly over all that. Imagine being an airline steward trying to serve meals to a plane full of Moslems, Jews, vegetarians, vegans and diabetics when all you've got is turkey because it's Christmas time.

-- Douglas Adams

I am rarely happier than when spending entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

-- Douglas Adams

"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?" This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself.

-- Douglas Adams

The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true? "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."

-- Douglas Adams

And that, apart from a flurry of sensational newspaper reports which exposed him as a fraud, then trumpeted him as the real thing so that they could have another round of exposing him as a fraud again and then trumpeting him as the real thing again, until they got bored and found a nice juicy snooker player to harass instead, was that.

-- Douglas Adams

This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way's life (...) The weather forecast hadn't mentioned that, of course, that wasn't the job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out.

-- Douglas Adams

WFT-II was the only British software company that could be mentioned in the same sentence as such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus. The sentence would probably run along the lines of "WFT-II, unlike such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or Lotus ..." but it was a start.

-- Douglas Adams

"Or maybe she decided that an evening with your old tutor would be blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating course of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would have done. It's only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a hectic social round these days."

-- Douglas Adams

The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye.

-- Douglas Adams

"(..) Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!"

-- Douglas Adams

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.

-- Douglas Adams

Stotting' is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you've seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow.

-- Douglas Adams

For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.

-- Douglas Adams

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

-- Douglas Adams

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

-- Douglas Adams

There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right ... Or put it another way, "The future of computer power is pure simplicity."

-- Douglas Adams

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

-- Douglas Adams

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

-- Douglas Adams

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

-- Douglas Adams

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them.

-- Douglas Adams

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

-- Douglas Adams

The news networks don't like this kind of thing. They regard it as a waste. An incontrovertible spaceship arrives out of nowhere in the middle of London and it is sensational news of the highest magnitude. Another completely different one arrives three and a half hours later and somehow it isn't.

-- Douglas Adams

You see, the reason why they have never thought `We are alone in the Universe' is that until tonight they don't know about the Universe. Until tonight.
-- Douglas Adams

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife. He would feel very, very embarrassed meeting everybody.
-- Douglas Adams

Random thought she was trapped in a recurring nightmare. She would have crying fits and think the moon was out to get her. Every night it was there, and then, when it went, the sun came out and followed her. Over and over again.
-- Douglas Adams

You'll have to excuse me. I just hitched from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula.
-- Douglas Adams

It wasn't his job to worry about that, though. It was his job to do his job, which was to do his job. If that led to a certain narrowness of vision and circularity of thought then it wasn't his job to worry about such things.
-- Douglas Adams

There was a long silence, during which they thought they could feel the Universe age a little.
-- Douglas Adams

"Oh God," muttered Ford, slumped against a bulkhead and started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentinent life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.
-- Douglas Adams

"I have had a day," said Arthur, "of extreme telephonic exhaustion."
-- Douglas Adams

"Don't pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me." "No I don't." "Yes you do, everybody does. It's part of the shape of the Universe."
-- Douglas Adams

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it's prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of a grip, whether it's the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
-- Douglas Adams

"I said "dear lady"," explained Ford Prefect, "because I didn't want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin ..."
-- Douglas Adams

Ford narrowed his eyes. "This is that thing you call sarcasm, isn't it?"
-- Douglas Adams

"Ship's cabin robots get destroyed. The cyberminds that control them survive and start infesting the local wildlife. Can turn a whole ecosystem into some kind of helpless thrashing service industry, handing out hot towels and drinks to passers-by."
-- Douglas Adams

And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were good at, and being good at it, they did a lot. They fought their enemies (i.e. everybody else), they fought each other. Their planet was a complete wreck. The surface was littered with abandoned cities which were surrounded by abandoned war machines, which were in turn surrounded by deep bunkers in which the Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.
-- Douglas Adams

He headed to the outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy where, it was said, wisdom and truth were to be found, most particularly on the planet Hawalius, which was a planet of oracles and seers and soothsayers and also take-away pizza shops, because most mystics were completely incapable of cooking for themselves.
-- Douglas Adams

"You think you've got problems," said Marvin as if he was addressing a newly occupied coffin.
-- Douglas Adams

"I don't know, you tell me. You live here! There must be some way off this zarking planet."
-- Douglas Adams

It was simply decorated, furnished with things made out of cushions and also a stereo set with speakers which would have impressed the guys who put up Stonehenge.
-- Douglas Adams

Los Angeles: like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth.
-- Douglas Adams

It was deadly - not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.
-- Douglas Adams

Of all the races on the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I'm afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.
-- Douglas Adams

"It's all right, officer," he said. "I've been dreaming for the last five years. Ask him," he added, pointing at Ford, "he was in it."
-- Douglas Adams

"Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
-- Douglas Adams

"You know nothing of future time," pronounced Deep Thought, "and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design."
-- Douglas Adams

He furrowed his brow until you could grow some of the smaller root vegetables in it.
-- Douglas Adams

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
-- Douglas Adams

Zaphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like the hell of a guy he was. He was very confused, but continued crawling doggedly anyway because he was that brave.
-- Douglas Adams

He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere on SaquoPilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating the annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm. What King Antwelm had assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best possible time together. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly good one that he was made into a saint for it.
-- Douglas Adams

"I'm afraid," he said at last, "that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same universe."
-- Douglas Adams

"Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen." That's it. It's what you pray silently inside yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.
-- Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.
-- Douglas Adams

We apologise for the inconvenience
-- Douglas Adams

Fourteen hours later the sun sank hopelessly beneath the opposite horizon with a sense of totally wasted effort.

-- Douglas Adams

"I like everything," moaned the robot. "Especially when you shout at me like that. Do it again, please."

-- Douglas Adams

"Zark Off"

-- Douglas Adams

"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."

-- Douglas Adams

"Why can't people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?" said Arthur. Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh. "Forty-two!" he said with a malicious grin, "No, doesn't work. Never mind."

-- Douglas Adams

He could not conceive that he could feel more wretched and awful than this, but he was wrong.

-- Douglas Adams

And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged down the sky after him, for, though he did not know it, Rob McKeena was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.

-- Douglas Adams

"What do you mean, why's it got to be built?" he said. "It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses."

-- Douglas Adams

The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving force behind all change, development and innovation in life, which was this: herring sandwiches.

-- Douglas Adams

The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway.

-- Douglas Adams

If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves, come down again when they feel better.

-- Douglas Adams

When the rains departed, it was a sign. When the winds rose, it was a sign. When the winds fell, it was a sign. When in the land there was born at midnight of a full moon a goat with three heads, that was a sign.

-- Douglas Adams

She didn't notice that she felt this, because it was the only way she ever felt, just as it never seemed odd to her that nearly everywhere she went she needed either to wear weights or anti-gravity suits and usually special apparatus for breathing as well. It had never occurred to her that the real Universe was something you could actually fit into.

-- Douglas Adams

"Stay out of this, Marvin," he said, "this is organism talk."

-- Douglas Adams

You should be more mattresslike. We live quiet retired lives in the swamp, where we are content to flollop and vollue and regard the wetness in a fairly floopy manner. Some of us are killed, but all of us are called Zem, so we never know which and globbering is thus kept to a minimum.
-- Douglas Adams

We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.
-- Douglas Adams

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much."
-- Douglas Adams

He looked around for the others. They obstinately persisted in their absence.
-- Douglas Adams

"He's spending a year dead for tax reasons."
-- Douglas Adams

Stones, then rocks, then boulders which pranced past him like clumsy puppies, only much, much bigger, much, much harder and heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill you if they fell on you.
-- Douglas Adams

In a spirit of scientific enquiry he hurled himself out of the window again.
-- Douglas Adams

The plant was a clover. It threw its weight, or rather its seed, around extremely effectively and rapidly became the world's dominant type of clover.
-- Douglas Adams

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.
-- Douglas Adams

Very soon it would be time to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to find out what time of day it was, what time of year it was, and whether in any of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi going anywhere.
-- Douglas Adams

He had lost everything he cared for, and was now simply waiting for the end of the world - little realizing that it had already been and gone.
-- Douglas Adams

The fronting for the eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly twenty thousand Antarean Mosaic Lizard skins, despite the fact that the twenty thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in.
-- Douglas Adams

He felt the way he imagined an angel must feel during its celebrated dance on the head of a pin whilst being counted by philosophers.
-- Douglas Adams

Much had been heard - more grindings and rumblings from deep within the craft, the music of a million hideous malfunctions.
-- Douglas Adams

"Life," he said, "will be a very great deal less weird without you!"
-- Douglas Adams

"Why are we surrounded by squirrels, and what do they want?"
-- Douglas Adams

The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in more common usage.
-- Douglas Adams

If a sunbeam had ever managed to slink this far into the Justice complex of Argabuthon it would have turned around and slunk straight back out again.
-- Douglas Adams

"Yes, it's the right planet, all right. Right planet, wrong universe."
-- Douglas Adams

He could sense, too, the thrill of being a tree, which was something he hadn't expected. He knew that it felt good to curl your toes in the earth, but he'd never realized it could feel quite as good as that.
-- Douglas Adams

"You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in. I happen to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag you'd made of my previous skin. Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you are also staggeringly tactless."
-- Douglas Adams

The first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he realised resignedly, was to get himself a life. This meant he had to find a planet he could have one on. It had to be a planet he could breathe on, where he could stand up and sit down without experiencing gravitational discomfort.
-- Douglas Adams

"My other car is also a Porsche."
-- Douglas Adams

If there was one thing life had taught her it was that there are times when you do not go back for your bag and other times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasion.
-- Douglas Adams

Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.
-- Douglas Adams

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
-- Douglas Adams

Her mood swings were very unpredictable but so far they'd all been between different types of bad ones.
-- Douglas Adams

"I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."
-- Douglas Adams

"The mere thought," growled Mr Prosser, "hadn't even begun to speculate," he continued, settling himself back, "about the merest possibility of crossing my mind."
-- Douglas Adams

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting.
-- Douglas Adams

The dog was called Know-Nothing-Bozo because the way its hair stood up on its head it reminded people of the President of the United States.
-- Douglas Adams

"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."
-- Douglas Adams

"You have to get to know her," said Arthur. "She eases up does she?" "No," said Arthur, "but you get a better sense of when to duck."
-- Douglas Adams

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services.
-- Douglas Adams

One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
-- Douglas Adams

He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.
-- Douglas Adams

Arthur leapt to his feet with a start of fear. It would be hard to say which he was more frightened of: that he might have hurt the person he had inadvertently sat on or that the person he had inadvertently sat on would hurt him back.
-- Douglas Adams

This was the biggest breakthrough of all. Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behaviour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply. All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out for themselves.
-- Douglas Adams

"Bistromathics," he said. "The most powerful computational force known to parascience."
-- Douglas Adams

"Well, in the few skirmishes they've had recently, it seems that they go into battle, raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is it all about?"
-- Douglas Adams

After a long, heart-stopping moment of internal crashes and grumbles of rending machinery, there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall. It held up a hand. "I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."
-- Douglas Adams

He could only think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne.
-- Douglas Adams

How To Build Your Own Asylum (Tm)

-hope this helped
DNA
-- Douglas Adams

'You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to the building plans had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.'

-- Douglas Adams

'Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.'

-- Douglas Adams

How can I tell that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

-- Douglas Adams

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