Douglas Adams > Quotes

“He had rather liked Zaphod Beeblebrox in a strange sort of way. He was clearly a man of many quallities, even if they were mostly bad ones.”
― Douglas Adams

“It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“And what’s happened to the Earth?” “Ah. It’s been demolished.” “Has it,” said Arthur levelly. “Yes. It just boiled away into space.” “Look,” said Arthur, “I’m a bit upset about that.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“...his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would be dead before the day was out.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“I think that the BBC’s attitude toward the show while it was in production was very similar to that which Macbeth had toward murdering people—initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm and then greater and greater alarm at the sheer scale of the undertaking and still no end in sight.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Sonra, adamın birinin, değişiklik olsun diye bundan böyle halka nazik davranmanın ne kadar iyi olacağını dile getirdiği için bir ağaca çivilenmesinden yaklaşık iki bin yıl sonra, bir Perşembe günü, Rickmansworth'de küçük bir kafede tek başına oturan bir kız, bunca zamandır ters giden şeyin ne olduğunu birdenbire fark edip en sonunda dünyanın nasıl iyileştirilebileceğini ve mutluluğun hüküm sürdüğü bir yere dönüştürülebileceğini anlamıştı. Bu sefer doğru olanı bulmuştu, bu işe yarayacak ve hiç kimsenin bir yerlere çivilenmesi gerekmeyecekti.
Ama ne yazıktır ki, bir telefon bulup birilerine bundan söz edemeden korkunç, aptal bir felaket meydana geldi ve fikir sonsuza dek yitip gitti.
Bu, o kızın öyküsü değil.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Mrs E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts was an elderly lady, indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some, but, she was a little uneasy to feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too routine.
With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shutter and looked out over the wing.
At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.
By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.
She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyways, so their opinion can and should be discounted.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“My late friend Graham Chapman, an idiosyncratic driver at the best of times, used to exploit the mutual incomprehension of British and U.S. driving habits by always carrying both British and California driver’s licences. Whenever he was stopped in the States, he would flash his British licence, and vice versa. He would also mention that he was just on his way to the airport to leave the country, which he always found to be such welcome news that the police would breathe a sigh of relief and wave him on.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Vell, Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“One of Zaphod's heads looked away. The other turned round to see what the first was looking at, but it wasn't looking at anything very much.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I'm a writer and I'm feeling like death, as you would too if you'd just flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan at some ungodly hour of the morning only to discover that you can't get into your hotel room for another three hours. In fact it's enough just to have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you are a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, then please assume that I am just kidding. Anyone else will surely realise that I am not.

Having nowhere else to go, I am standing up, leaning against a mantelpiece. Well, a kind of mantelpiece. I don't know what it is, in fact. It's made of brass and some kind of plastic and was probably drawn in by the architect after a nasty night on the town. That reminds me of another favourite piece of information: there is a large kink in the trans-Siberian railway because when the Czar (I don't know which Czar it was because I am not in my study at home I'm leaning against something shamefully ugly in Michigan and there are no books) decreed that the trans-Siberian railway should be built, he drew a line on a map with a ruler. The ruler had a nick in it.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be”
― Douglas Adams

“In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink.”
― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“That’s right … we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin. And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball.

People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything. I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts - it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself.

Every single aspect of a piece of music can be represented by numbers. From the organization of movements in a whole symphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rhythm that make up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shape the performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes themselves, their harmonics, the way they change over time, in short, all the elements of a noise that distinguish between the sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another one thumping a drum - all of these things can be expressed by patterns and hierarchies of numbers. And in my experience the more internal relationships there are between the patterns of numbers at different levels of the hierarchy, however complex and subtle those relationships may be, the more satisfying and, well, whole, the music will seem to be. In fact the more subtle and complex those relationships, and the further they are beyond the grasp of the conscious mind, the more the instinctive part of your mind - by which I mean that part of your mind that can do differential calculus so astoundingly fast that it will put your hand in the right place to catch a flying ball- the more that part of your brain revels in it. Music of any complexity (and even "Three Blind Mice" is complex in its way by the time someone has actually performed it on an instrument with its own individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the arms of your own private mathematical genius who dwells in your unconscious responding to all the inner complexities and relationships and proportions that we think we know nothing about.

Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it's never been out of it.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“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, Last Chance to See

“The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If you don’t open that exit hatch this moment I shall zap straight off to your major data banks and reprogram you with a very large axe, got that?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn’t actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I’ve ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams

“They've discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold," he said, in a sudden blur of coherence.

"You're kidding."

"Oh yes," he said, "no," he corrected himself, "they have."

He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely.

"Have you been to California?" he demanded. "Do you know the sort of stuff they do there?"

Three members of his audience said they had and that he was talking nonsense.

"You haven't seen anything," insisted Arthur. "Oh yes," he added, because someone was offering to buy another round.”
― Duglass Adamss, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

“Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“They live in perpetual fear of the time they call "The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief”
― Douglas Adams

“NO ADMITTANCE.
NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.
YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.
GO AWAY.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See