Quotes by Douglas Adams

There is no point in using the word impossible to describe something that has clearly happened.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime is doubly so.

Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules.

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

Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

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.

He's spending a year dead for tax reasons.

Gordon Way's astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing compared to his astonishment at what happened next.

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

A five-week sand blizzard? said Deep Thought haughtily. You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.

Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood...blood...blood...blood.

Luckily, he went on, you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as 'impossible' in my dictionary. In fact, he added, brandishing the abused book, everything between 'herring' and 'marmalade' appears to be missing.

One always overcompensates for disabilities. I'm thinking of having my entire body surgically removed.

And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo.

It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?

The story goes that I first had the idea for The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck.

My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.

The impossible did not bother him unduly. If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly.

A theory of the universe that states: If anyone finds out what the universe is for, it will disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable.

I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course -- the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.

He sniggered.
He didn't like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.

For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.

The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.

Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

Being offended by things is the world's big hobby at the moment. It's almost taken over from wearing goatee beards.

If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?

I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it's less good than what I do, there's no point in reading it, if it's better than what I do it makes me depressed.

Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.

For as long as he could remember, he'd suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not all there.

'Totally mad,' he said, 'utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense.'

Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.

Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or as his wife would have it, an idiot.

Perhaps they are singing songs to you,' he said, 'and I just think they're asking me questions.' He paused again. Sometimes he would pause for days, just to see what it was like.

It's reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is woking.

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

As soon as Mr. Prosser realized that he was substantially the loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it.

Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

Imagine he said, never even thinking, 'We are alone,' simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there's any other way to be.

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

Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?

When we told our guide that we didn't want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don't want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists.

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.

The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write.

Could be. I'm a pretty dangerous dude when I'm cornered.
Yeah, said the voice from under the table, you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.

The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference. Being virtually killed by virtual laser in virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

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

If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end.

There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.

Time is bunk.

The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!

What is the point? 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!

He didn't know why he had become president of the galaxy, except that it seemed a fun thing to be.

But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.

There was a terribly ghastly silence. There was a terribly ghastly noise. There was a terribly ghastly silence.

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

The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.

Fuck 'em, said Ford, slumping on the bed. You can't care about every damn thing.

Wail, wail, screech, wail, honk, honk, squeak went the bagpipes, increasing the captain's already considerable pleasure at the thought that any moment now they might stop.

We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books.

Their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do.

Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren't up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up.

I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.

What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.

The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it.

Dirk looked at her expressionlessly. Apart from being extremely good-looking in a blondish, willowyish kind of way, she was dressed well in an I don't care what I wear, just any old thing that's lying around kind of way that relies on extremely careful about what you leave lying around.

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

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.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

He turned slowly like a fridge door opening.

Goosnargh, said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be.

Will you stop counting!' snarled Zaphod. 'Yes,' said Ford Prefect, 'in three minutes and thirty-five seconds.

I've never understood all this fuss people make about the dawn. I've seen a few and they're never as good as the photographs, which have the additional advantage of being things you can look at when you're in the right frame of mind, which is usually around lunchtime.

The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago now, and there has been no follow up.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

Ah, thank you,' said Ford. He and Arthur took their jynnan tonnyx. Arthur sipped his, and was surprised to discover it tasted very like a whisky and soda.

Yes but, Arthur, that's ridiculous. People think that if you just say 'hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will just go away.

Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses have been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

They live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief.

What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Zbogom, i hvala za svu tu ribu!

Oh, er, well the hatchway in front of us will open in a few moments and we will shoot out into deep space I expect and asphyxiate. If you take a lungful of air with you you can last for up to thirty seconds, of course.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You are very tall or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty foot well, are you all right?

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

I want to make a headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let¡s call it my stomach.

Arthur lay in startled stillness on the acceleration couch. He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.

If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you are in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner, please, don't hesitate to get lost.

The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.

The Answer to the Great Question... Of Life, the Universe and Everything... Is... Forty-two,' said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Could be. I'm a pretty dangerous dude when I'm cornered. Yeah, said the voice from under the table, you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.

Who is this god person anyway?

My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes.

You know, said Arthur, 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. Why, what did she tell you? I don't know, I didn't listen.

You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognize. Hmmm. So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business as usual , I suppose.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

Why' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it. The alphabet does not go 'A B C D What? When? How?' but it does go 'V W X Why? Z.

Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in a virtual space is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as you think you are.

I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don't believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with.

Sorry, did I say something wrong? said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed. Here's another one of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life.

Don't blame you, said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a second later.

Funny, how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does.

Life! Don't talk to me about life!

The waiter approached. 'Would you like to see the menu?' he said. 'Or would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?' 'Huh?' said Ford. 'Huh?' said Arthur. 'Huh?' said Trillian. 'That's cool,' said Zaphod. 'We'll meet the meat.