Quotes from Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term future perfect has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of millions of light-years from end to end.

Marvin, he said, just get this elevator go up will you? We've got to get to Zarniwoop. Why? asked Marvin dolefully. I don't know, said Zaphod, but when I find him, he'd better have a very good reason for me wanting to see him.

Hey this is terrific! Zaphod said. Someone down there is trying to kill us!

But unless we determine to take action,' said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, 'then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?' 'Not enough to want to get killed over it,' said Ford.

I thought," he said, "that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something." "If you like, yes," said Ford. "That's what they told us in the army," said the man, and his eyes began the long trek back down to his whisky. "Will that help?" asked the barman. "No," said Ford and gave him a friendly smile.

At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.

Uglier things have been spotted in the skies, but not by reliable witnesses.

I thought you must be dead …" he said simply. "So did I for a while," said Ford, "and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.

Same as you, Arthur. I hitched a ride. After all, with a degree in maths and another in astrophysics it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday. Sorry I missed the Wednesday lunch date, but I was in a black hole all morning.

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.

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

Damn and blast British Telecom, shouted Dirk, the words coming easily from force of habit.

I've just had an unhappy love affair, so I don't see why anybody else should have a good time.

The mice will see you now, he said.

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 went to Cambridge University. I took a number of baths - and a degree in English. I worried a lot about girls and what had happened to my bike. Later I became I writer and worked on a lot of things that were almost incredibly successful but in fact just failed to see the light of day. Other writers will know what I mean.

She felt faintly embarrassed by the sheer profusion of things she had for putting in baths, but she was for some reason incapable of passing any chemist's or herb shop without going in to be seduced by some glass-stoppered bottle of something blue or green or orange or oily that was supposed to restore the natural balance of some vague substance she didn't even know she was supposed to have in her pores.

Freedom, he said out loud... I can't cope with it..

Look, why don't you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?" He gestured Arthur toward a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus. "It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the old man

The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring. Or the phone. She looked at her watch. She felt that now was about the time that she could legitimately begin to feel cross. She was cross already, of course, but that had been in her own time, so to speak.

I wanted to join Footlights," he says. "I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.

That is really amazing.' he said. 'That really is truly amazing. That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it.