A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
After nearly four years of total isolation he was so pleased and relieved to see Ford that he could almost cry. Ford was, on the other hand, an almost immediately annoying person.
Douglas Adams
A glummer look replaced the already glum look on Arthur Dent’s face. “So we’re not home and dry,” he said. “We could not even be said,” replied Ford, “to be home and vigorously toweling ourselves off.”
Douglas Adams
All eyes were on Ford. Some were on stalks.
Douglas Adams
All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
Douglas Adams
“All right,” said Ford, “I’ll try to explain. How long have we known each other?” “How long?” Arthur thought. “Er, about five years, maybe six,” he said. “Most of it seemed to make some sense at the time.”
Douglas Adams
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.
Douglas Adams
A magician wandered along the beach, but no one needed him.
Douglas Adams
A man can’t cross a hundred thousand light years, mostly in other people’s baggage compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.
Douglas Adams
And no sneaky knocking down Mr. Dent's house whilst he's away, alright?
Douglas Adams
And somewhere on this good boffo stretch of coastline lay the house of this inconsolable man, a man whom many regarded as being insane. But this was only, as he would tell people, because he was.
Douglas Adams
Anyone who confuses the story of a spaceship careening through space with the sinking of a ship in 1912 is probably very, very dumb. Not that I mind selling the game to very, very dumb people. Their money is as good as anyone else's.
Douglas Adams
“Are you telling me,” he said, “that you set yourself up to become President of the Galaxy just to steal that ship?” “That’s it,” said Zaphod with the sort of grin that would get most people locked away in a room with soft walls.
Douglas Adams
Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at the sweaty disheveled clothes he had been lying in the mud in on Thursday morning. “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” he muttered to himself.
Douglas Adams
Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let it all wash over him.
Douglas Adams
Arthur lay in startled stillness on the acceleration couch. He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.
Douglas Adams
Arthur's consciousness approached his body as from a great distance, and reluctantly. It had had some bad times in there. Slowly, nervously, it entered and settled down in to its accustomed position.
Douglas Adams
Arthur stared into his beer. "Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?"
Douglas Adams
As soon as Mr. Prosser realized that he was substantially the loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it.
Douglas Adams
A tall figure appeared silhouetted in the hatchway. It walked down the ramp and stood in front of Arthur. “You’re a jerk, Dent,” it said simply.
Douglas Adams
Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had taught her anything it was this: Never go back for your bag.
Douglas Adams
Dirk gave a gracious bow of his head to the man’s retreating back, and then hurried on, opening the newspaper at the horoscope page as he did so. “Virtually everything you decide today will be wrong,” it said bluntly.
Douglas Adams
Dirk, please, if you would. I prefer it. It has more of a sort of Scottish dagger feel to it.
Douglas Adams
"Don't tell me about the future," said Ford. "I've been all over the future. Spend half my time there. It's the same as anywhere else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air."
Douglas Adams
Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game.
Douglas Adams
Er, excuse me, who am I? Hello? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I?
Douglas Adams
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
Douglas Adams
Ford and Arthur decided just to relax and be harrowed.
Douglas Adams
"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out!"
Douglas Adams
Ford looked angrily at him. “Will you listen?” he snapped. “I have been listening,” said Arthur, “but I’m not sure it’s helped.”
Douglas Adams
Ford was practicing being sullen and getting quite good at it.
Douglas Adams
Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it. MIT, 1999
Douglas Adams
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.
Douglas Adams
He always entered via the ventilation system rather than the main lobby because the main lobby was patrolled by robots whose job it was to quiz incoming employees about their expense accounts.
Douglas Adams
He didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.
Douglas Adams
He had a very simple method of dealing with establishments of which he was not a member. He simply swept in as soon as the door was opened, pointed back at Arthur and said, “It’s OK, he’s with me.”
Douglas Adams
He hadn’t had a day as bad as this since the Earth had been blown up.
Douglas Adams
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
Douglas Adams
He looked up at the sky, which was sullen, streaked and livid, and reflected that it was the sort of sky that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn't feel like a bunch of complete idiots riding out of.
Douglas Adams
Here the man in blue crimplene accosted us once more but we patiently explained to him that he could fuck off.
Douglas Adams
He was tall, dark, and laconic and had a slight nervous tick. He explained that he used to be just tall, dark, and laconic, but that the events of the last few days had rather got to him.
Douglas Adams
I didn't notice I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals.
Douglas Adams
I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
Douglas Adams
If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.
Douglas Adams
If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
Douglas Adams
I get all my ideas from a mail order company in Indianapolis. Although I'm not prepared to give you their name.
Douglas Adams
I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Douglas Adams
I knew I was on to something because when I went to San Francisco to talk about it everyone said I was mad. So I thought, "Good, it means nobody else is doing it."
Douglas Adams
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams
In Islington you can hardly hurl a brick without hitting three antique shops, an estate agent and a bookshop.
Douglas Adams
I say roughly, because the gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency declaration forms, and official bribery, and tend to wander backwards and forwards across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them.
Douglas Adams
Is that robot yours? he said. “No,” came a thin metallic voice from the crater, “I’m mine.” “If you’d call it a robot,” muttered Arthur. “It’s more a sort of electronic sulking machine.”
Douglas Adams
I think I prefer fish, said Gaynor. Kiri explained that she was wrong and that she preferred chicken to fish. Westerners, he explained, preferred chicken. It was well known. Fish was only cheap food for peasants. We would be eating chicken, which was sexy and which we preferred.
Douglas Adams
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Douglas Adams
It's a few years since I've written a novel and I think we're moving from a position where I have a publisher hav[ing] a contract with me to having a contract on me.
Douglas Adams
It’s all right, it’s just a horse in the bathroom.
Douglas Adams
It’s all right. There’s nothing to see, it’s all over. None of this is actually happening.
Douglas Adams
It was a battered yellow Citroën 2CV which had had one careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones.
Douglas Adams
It wasn’t his job to worry about that, though. It was his job to do his job, which was to do his job. If that led to a certain narrowness of vision and circularity of thought then it wasn’t his job to worry about such things.
Douglas Adams
It wasn’t merely that their left hand didn’t always know what their right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand had a pretty hazy notion as well.
Douglas Adams
“I was being perfectly serious,” said Arthur. “It’s just the Universe I’m never quite sure about.”
Douglas Adams
Life is like a grapefruit. It's sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.
Douglas Adams
"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."
Douglas Adams
Mason gave him another grim look from a vast repertoire he had developed which ranged from very, very blackly grim indeed at the bottom of the scale, all the way up to tiredly resigned and only faintly grim, which he reserved for his children's birthdays.
Douglas Adams
My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.
Douglas Adams
My main role at The Digital Village is to create new projects, to move from one medium to another, to think strategically about new media and to fiddle with bits of equipment.
Douglas Adams
My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.
Douglas Adams
“Myself I’d trust him to the end of the Earth,” said Ford. “Oh yes,” said Arthur, “and how far’s that?” “About twelve minutes away,” said Ford, “come on, I need a drink.”
Douglas Adams
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks. Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else which thinks at least as logically as it does.
Douglas Adams
"Now, that I didn't know," said Reg. "Your past has murkier things in it than I dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shares with this soup."
Douglas Adams
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of accidently becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with.
Douglas Adams
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can’t. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
Douglas Adams
“One thing,” he further added, “has suddenly ceased to lead to another” – in contradiction of which he had another drink and slid gracelessly off his chair.
Douglas Adams
Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.
Douglas Adams
People ask me what my favorite character is, to which the answer has usually been, after a long umm and a pause, 'probably Marvin.' It's not something I strongly feel.
Douglas Adams
People knew how to have a good time, and if they didn’t there were courses they could sign up for which would put that right.
Douglas Adams
She didn’t even programme any coordinates, she hadn’t the faintest idea where she was going, she just went – a random row of dots flowing through the Universe. “Anything,” she said to herself as she left, “is better than this.”
Douglas Adams
She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.
Douglas Adams
Somewhere not too far from here, toward the middle of the island, there may have been heaven on earth, but hell had certainly set up business on its porch.
Douglas Adams
"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen ..." and so on.
Douglas Adams
‘Stotting’ is jumping upward with all four legs simultaneously. My advice: do not die until you’ve seen a large black poodle stotting in the snow.
Douglas Adams
Suddenly he realized what the answer to the problem was, and it was this, that something very weird was happening; and if something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted it to be happening to him.
Douglas Adams
Talking to yourself is a sign of impending mental collapse.
Douglas Adams
The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and didn’t tell anybody anything they didn’t already know – except that every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena.
Douglas Adams
The difference between us and a computer is that, the computer is blindingly stupid, but it is capable of being stupid many, many million times a second.
Douglas Adams
The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With."
Douglas Adams
The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.
Douglas Adams
[The Guide] says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
Douglas Adams
The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them.
Douglas Adams
The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place.
Douglas Adams
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
Douglas Adams
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Douglas Adams
“The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is no point driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself from going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.”
Douglas Adams
The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Douglas Adams
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
Douglas Adams
There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right ... Or put it another way, "The future of computer power is pure simplicity."
Douglas Adams
There is something profoundly disturbing about watching an eye that is watching you, particularly when the eye that is watching you is almost the same size as your eye, and the thing that it is watching you out of is a lizard.
Douglas Adams
There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.
Douglas Adams
The road suddenly turns out to be impassable because it's being rebuilt by the Chinese, only we're not supposed to know that. And exactly what is meant by 'suddenly' I don't know because they've apparently been at it for ten years.
Douglas Adams
The suns blazed into the pitch of space and a low ghostly music floated through the bridge: Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.
Douglas Adams
The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn’t something that was just there.
Douglas Adams
They like their meat bad and smelly. We don't like our meat like that and tend to be leery of things that do. I was definitely leery of these lizards.
Douglas Adams
“This must be Thursday”, said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, “I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”
Douglas Adams
Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it.
Douglas Adams
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
Douglas Adams
Well, it's such a nice change not to be asked what I meant by 42, what my favourite character is or whether I've read any Terry Pratchett. (snore...)
Douglas Adams
Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I'm not married to.
Douglas Adams
“We would love to stay and help,” shouted Ford, picking his way over the mangled debris, “only we’re not going to.”
Douglas Adams
"Who said anything about panicking?" snapped Arthur. "This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start panicking."
Douglas Adams
“Yes it is,” said the Professor. “Wait—” he motioned to Richard, who was about to go out again and investigate— “let it be. It won’t be long.”
Douglas Adams
You are disoriented. Blackness swims toward you like a school of eels who have just seen something that eels like a lot.
Douglas Adams
“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.” “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.”
Douglas Adams
You have to be careful, I've come to realize. Once in a hotel in New York, [I met] the receptionist who was just....mindbogglingly dense. You have one of these conversations where you really think the universe is sort of bending around you, it's so stupid.
Douglas Adams
“You have to get to know her.” said Arthur. “She eases up does she?” “No,” said Arthur, “but you get a better sense of when to duck.”
Douglas Adams
"You'll have to excuse me," said Arthur. "I'm terribly happy."
Douglas Adams
You're one hundred percent positive that the ship which is crashed on the bottom of this ocean is the ship which you said you were one hundred percent positive could one hundred percent positively never crash?
Douglas Adams
“You’re proposing twenty hours on a boat-” “A small boat,” added Mark. “On violently heaving seas-” “Probably.” “With a three-day-old dead goat.” “Yes.” “I hardly know what to say.”
Douglas Adams
You would probably not say that he was sleeping the sleep of the just, unless you meant the just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling about when he climbed into bed at night and turned off the light.
Douglas Adams
Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippy, good timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.
Douglas Adams
“Zaphod’s calmed down a lot you know.” “Really?” said Arthur, clustering hurriedly round Fenchurch to relieve her of the shopping. “Yeah,” said Ford, “at least one of his heads is now saner than an emu on acid.”
Douglas Adams
“Zaphod! Wake up!” “Mmmmmwwwwwerrrrr?” “Hey come on, wake up.” “Just let me stick to what I’m good at, yeah?” muttered Zaphod and rolled away from the voice back to sleep.
Douglas Adams