Quotes from Douglas Adams

Even light, which travels so fast it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.

Fifteen years was a long time to be stranded anywhere, particularly somewhere as mind-boggingly dull as Earth.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

I don't think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn't becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it's very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.'

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

I have rooms full of little dongly things and don't want any more. Half the little dongly things I've got, I don't even know what gizmo they're for. More importantly, half the gizmos I've got, I don't know where their little dongly thing is.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them.

Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.

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

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

I think you get most of the most interesting work done in fields where people don't think they're doing art but are merely practicing a craft and working as good craftsmen. Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.

Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously.

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.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

Hundreds of people who've never written before send in 'Dr. Who' scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

I remember very little about writing the first series of 'Hitchhiker's.' It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

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.

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