Quotes from Douglas Adams

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

This planet has - or rather had - 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 movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

So this is it, said Arthur, We are going to die. Yes, said Ford, except... no! Wait a minute! He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. What's this switch? he cried. What? Where? cried Arthur, twisting round. No, I was only fooling, said Ford, we are going to die after all.

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

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

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

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

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

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

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

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

God's Final Message to His Creation: 'We apologize for the inconvenience.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

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

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.

If I ever meet myself,' said Zaphod, 'I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

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

There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.

A cup of tea would restore my normality. [ Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Screenplay ]

Did I do anything wrong today, he said, or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?