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For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient and omnipotent, extremely vain, and, what is more, I come in a handy self-carrying package.
It would be hard to say which he was more frightened of: that he might have hurt the person he had inadvertently sat on or that the person he had inadvertently sat on would hurt him back.
‘Well, there’s probably a lot you don’t know about me,’ said Arthur. ‘Come to mention it, there’s probably a lot I don’t know about me either.’
cybernightmare.’
Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realizing that you had it.
sat down calmly in front of the giant computer display, spent a few moments familiarizing herself with the interface and then started smoothly and competently to pretend that she had the faintest idea what she was doing.
‘DO NOT DISTURB,’ the notice read. ‘DO NOT EVEN THINK OF ENTERING. I DON’T CARE WHAT IT IS. GO AWAY. I’M BUSY!’
He hadn’t had a day as bad as this since the Earth had been blown up.
‘Gonna buy that spaceship,’ said Ford quietly. ‘Buy it?’ said Arthur. ‘That’s not like you. I thought you usually pinched them.’ ‘Sometimes you have to show a little respect,’ said Ford. ‘Probably have to show a little cash as well,’
There hadn’t been a lot of noise before, but there was definitely a kind of silence now.
He was leaning against the bar at an extravagantly relaxed angle.
He was used to not knowing what was going on. He felt comfortable with it.
‘it’s at times like this that you kind of wonder if it’s worth worrying about the fabric of space–time and the causal integrity of the multi-dimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all wave forms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that’s been bugging me.
He glanced at his watch. This only served to remind him that he didn’t have his watch any more.
Mysteriously, Ford’s Dine-O-Charge card, issued on a planet over five thousand light-years away, seemed to present the hotel’s computer with no problems.
I don’t care if you’re busy. This is room service, I’m in a room and I want some service.
I always feel a bit bad about foie gras. Bit cruel to the geese, isn’t it?’ ‘Fuck ’em,’ said Ford, slumping on the bed. ‘You can’t care about every damn thing.’
where the possible continually interfered with the probable.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’m trying desperately to remember which drug I’ve just taken, but it must be one of those ones which mean you can’t remember.’
We . . . must . . . leave . . . now. I can’t tell you where there is to go to. Perhaps there isn’t anywhere. But here is not the place to be. Please. One more time. Can we go?’
A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over.
the way you really get good ideas is from working with talented people you have fun with.
doors with ludicrously overdesigned user interfaces (what’s wrong with just pushing them?)
comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldn’t be expressed any other way.
But nowadays everybody’s a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently any more, not with sudden shock, astonishment or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly.
Where, thirty years ago we used to start up rock bands, we now start up Start-Ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange.
Mr L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape.
