Douglas Adams > Quotes

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Why doesn’t all the money go to the writer, I hear you (and indeed myself) asking. Well, maybe it will if he’s happy just to drop his words into the digital ocean in the hope that someone out there will find them. But like any ocean, the digital one has streams and eddies and currents, and publishers will quickly have a role finding good material to draw into those currents where readers will naturally be streaming through looking for stuff, which is more or less what they do at the moment. The difference will lie in the responsiveness of the market, the speed with which those streams will shift and surge, and the way in which power and control will shift to those who are actually contributing something useful rather than just having lunch. The thing we leave out of the model is, essentially, just a lot of dead wood.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I go up," said the elevator, "or down."
"Good," said Zaphod, "We're going up."
"Or down," the elevator reminded him.
"Yeah, OK, up please."
There was a moment of silence.
"Down's very nice," suggested the elevator hopefully.
"Oh yeah?"
"Super."
"Good," said Zaphod, "Now will you take us up?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“PRODO -explicó- es algo que no podemos ver, que no distinguimos o que nuestra mente no nos deja observar porque creemos que es un problema de otro. Eso es lo que significa PRODO. Problema de Otro. El cerebro se limita solamente a perfilarlo, es como un punto ciego. Si se mira directamente no se ve, a menos que se sepa qué es exactamente. La única esperanza consiste en percibirlo por sorpresa con el rabillo del ojo.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of a grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra, where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere. It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why. In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. In the summer it’s too darn hot. It’s one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it’s quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet’s orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin’s bubbling. Spring is overrated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they would know of at least 5,983 better places to spend it than New York, and that’s just on the same latitude. 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 anyway, so their opinion can and should be discounted. When it’s fall in New York, the air smells as if someone’s been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Zaphod Beeblebrox?” “No, just a Zaphod Beeblebrox; didn’t you hear I come in six packs?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“I don't want to die now! I've got a headache! I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Artık World Wide Web sözcüğü (kısaltılmış halinin -www- okunuşu, aslından daha uzun olan bildiğim tek terim) var ve bu heyecan verici yepyeni bir olay.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Bistromathics,” he said, “the most powerful computational force known to parascience.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Very nice,’ said Arthur. ‘Wonderfully nice. I don’t know when I’ve ever been anywhere nicer. I’m happy here. They like me, I make sandwiches for them, and . . . er, well that’s it really. They like me and I make sandwiches for them.’ ‘Sounds, er . . .’ ‘Idyllic,’ said Arthur, firmly. ‘It is. It really is. I don’t expect you’d like it very much, but for me it’s, well, it’s perfect.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“Seen from the outside, which it never is, the Restaurant resembles a giant glittering starfish beached on a forgotten rock. Each of its arms house the bars, the kitchens, the force-field generators which protect the entire structure and the decayed hunk of planet on which it sits, and the Time Turbines which slowly rock the whole affair backward and forward across the crucial moment.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Have you met Thor? He makes thunder.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy of Five

“The Answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe and Everything is…42!”
― Douglas Adams

“Arthur paused, warily. “You going to ask”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“If I ever meet myself,” said Zaphod, “I’ll hit myself so hard I won’t know what’s hit me.” Marvin”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy sequence used the tropes of science fiction to talk about the things that concerned Douglas, the world he observed, his thoughts on Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He paused just long enough to make them feel they ought to say something, and then interrupted.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors.”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Box Set: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.’ ‘Buzz them?’ Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him. ‘Yeah,’ said Ford, ‘they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and then strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.”
― Douglas Adams, The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five

“This must be Thursday, I could never get the hang of Thursdays.”

Arthur Dent”
― Douglas Adams, Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Book 1 of 3

“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.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?”
― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years.”
― Douglas Adams

“the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy