Quotes from Douglas Adams

2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change.

There is an art to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

We demand guaranteed rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own set of laws.

There comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.

There is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.

On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.

Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there's no point trying to look in that direction because it won't be coming from there.

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.

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.

When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring.

There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right.

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.

Life! Don't talk to me about life.

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

There is an art to flying ... or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth it for end users, however much fun it is for nerds.

My capacity for happiness ... you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like ... ow ... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good name -- ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?

Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.

Really, the moment you have any idea, the second thought that enters your mind after the original idea is, "What is this? Is it a book, is it a movie, is it a this, is it a that, is it a short story, is it a breakfast cereal?" Really, from that moment, your decision about what kind of thing it is then determines how it develops.

People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good. They quote that maxim "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public's taste" and I think that's very wrongheaded. I like to believe the audience is actually intelligent, because it's made up of other people like yourself.