Quotes from Douglas Adams

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink.

Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy.

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.

Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?

One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn't actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.

Three pints?" said Arthur. "At lunchtime?" The man next to Ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Where do you get the inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I've thought of an idea.

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

It's good to leave your room super-messy when you're away. Whoever tries to break into your room will thought it has already been ransacked.

Oh don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/ Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit

He had rather liked Zaphod Beeblebrox in a strange sort of way. He was clearly a man of many quallities, even if they were mostly bad ones.

NO ADMITTANCE. NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE. GO AWAY.

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

Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

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.

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.

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... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.

It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere.

Dirk was unused to making quite such a miniscule 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 on the doorway. He felt momentarily deflated and said, Er... by was 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.

It's the wild colour scheme that freaks me," said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, "Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?

If you don't open that exit hatch this moment I shall zap straight off to your major data banks and reprogram you with a very large axe, got that?

I think that the BBC's attitude toward the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had toward murdering people—initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight.

And what's happened to the Earth?" "Ah. It's been demolished." "Has it," said Arthur levelly. "Yes. It just boiled away into space." "Look," said Arthur, "I'm a bit upset about that.