Quotes from Douglas Adams

So what we have arrived at here—and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it's really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us—is "Is there really a universe that is not designed from the top downward, but from the bottom upward? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?

In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.

She remembered wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found that their only export was electricity—which, if she remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to be moved around in lorries.

Duty Free shops which are able to charge much lower prices than ordinary shops but - mysteriously - don't

Look, don't you understand?" shouted Arthur. He pointed at Prosser. "That man wants to knock my house down!" Ford glanced at him, puzzled. "Well, he can do it while you're away, can't he?" he asked. "But I don't want him to!

I wasn't in the universe, I was in England, a point that has been made to me before.

Parts of the inside of her head screamed at other parts of the inside of her head.

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.

Tips for aliens in New York: Land anywhere, Central Park, anywhere. No one will care or indeed even notice.

Ford stared at Arthur, and Arthur was astonished to find his will beginning to weaken. He didn't realize that this was because of an old drinking game that Ford learned to play in the hyper-space ports that served the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta.

A slight hiss built into a deafening roar of rushing air as the outer hatchway opened onto an empty blackness studded with tiny, impossibly bright points of light. Ford and Arthur popped into outer space like corks from a toy gun.

Don't stand there looking like a startled whatsisname, what are those things that aren't seals? Much worse than seals. Big, blubbery things. Dugongs. Don't stand there looking like a startled dugong. Why has that . . .

Between you and me, sir, I would've been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.

They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just he continual wrenching of experience.

Well, Gordon's great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program's task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.

Why?' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.

There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which you could actually swing a cat in. But only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn't mind a few nasty cracks about the head.

The alphabet does not go "A B C D What? When? How?" but it does go "V W X Why? Z.

She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she could fool herself she could fool anybody.

there emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which sound-track editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons which no one besides sound-track editors has ever been able to understand. In this particular case, however, the saxophone would have been silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which the same sound-track editor would almost certainly have slapped all over the progress of the vehicle. The

And Mrs Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?" "Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would've been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them.

There is a very simple principle to the making of tea, and it's this—to get the proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boilING (not boilED) when it hits the tea leaves. If it's merely hot, then the tea will be insipid.

the vaguely uncomfortable feeling you got from sitting on a seat which is warm from somebody else's bottom is just as real a feeling as the one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you

The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination.