Douglas Adams Quotes And Sayings

Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, scriptwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist. Adams is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which originated in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a “trilogy” of five books that sold more than 15 million copies in his lifetime and generated a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film. Adams’s contribution to UK radio is commemorated in The Radio Academy’s Hall of Fame. Adams was known as an advocate for environmentalism and conservation, as a lover of fast cars, cameras, technological innovation and the Apple Macintosh, and as a “devout atheist”.

I Love Deadlines. I Like The Whooshing Sound They Make As They Fly By.

Isn't It Enough To See That A Garden Is Beautiful Without Having To Believe That There Are Fairies At The Bottom Of It Too?

A Common Mistake That People Make When Trying To Design Something Completely Foolproof Is To Underestimate The Ingenuity Of Complete Fools.

Time Is An Illusion. Lunchtime Doubly So.

You Live And Learn. At Any Rate, You Live.

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 And Repair.

I'm Spending A Year Dead For Tax Reasons.

It Is A Well-known Fact That Those People Who Must Want To Rule People Are, Ipso Facto, Those Least Suited To Do It... Anyone Who Is Capable Of Getting Themselves Made President Should On No Account Be Allowed To Do The Job.

In The Beginning The Universe Was Created. This Has Made A Lot Of People Very Angry And Been Widely Regarded As A Bad Move.

It Is A Mistake To Think You Can Solve Any Major Problems Just With Potatoes.

To Give Real Service You Must Add Something Which Cannot Be Bought Or Measured With Money, And That Is Sincerity And Integrity.

I Think Fish Is Nice, But Then I Think That Rain Is Wet, So Who Am I To Judge?

Human Beings, Who Are Almost Unique In Having The Ability To Learn From The Experience Of Others, Are Also Remarkable For Their Apparent Disinclination To Do So.

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. There Is Another Theory Which States That This Has Already Happened.

Space Is Big. You Just Won't Believe How Vastly, Hugely, Mind-bogglingly Big It Is. I Mean, You May Think It's A Long Way Down The Road To The Drug Store, But That's Just Peanuts To Space.

This Must Be Thursday. I Never Could Get The Hang Of Thursdays.

I Seldom End Up Where I Wanted To Go, But Almost Always End Up Where I Need To Be.

He Was A Dreamer, A Thinker, A Speculative Philosopher... Or, As His Wife Would Have It, An Idiot.

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.

If You Try And Take A Cat Apart To See How It Works, The First Thing You Have On Your Hands Is A Nonworking Cat.

I Think That Growing Up In A Crowded Continent Like Europe With An Awful Lot Of Competing Claims, Ideas... Cultures... And Systems Of Thought, We Have, Perforce, Developed A More Sophisticated Notion Of What The Word 'Freedom' Means Than I See Much Evidence Of In America.

I Remember Very Little About Writing The First Series Of 'Hitchhiker's.' It's Almost As If Someone Else Wrote It.

Anyone Who Is Capable Of Getting Themselves Made President Should On No Account Be Allowed To Do The Job.

Of Course You Can't 'Trust' What People Tell You On The Web Anymore Than You Can 'Trust' What People Tell You On Megaphones, Postcards Or In Restaurants. Working Out The Social Politics Of Who You Can Trust And Why Is, Quite Literally, What A Very Large Part Of Our Brain Has Evolved To Do.

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.

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.

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.

The Knack Of Flying Is Learning How To Throw Yourself At The Ground And Miss.

It Is A Rare Mind Indeed That Can Render The Hitherto Non-existent Blindingly Obvious. The Cry 'I Could Have Thought Of That' Is A Very Popular And Misleading One, For The Fact Is That They Didn't, And A Very Significant And Revealing Fact It Is Too.

If It Looks Like A Duck, And Quacks Like A Duck, We Have At Least To Consider The Possibility That We Have A Small Aquatic Bird Of The Family Anatidae On Our Hands.

The Difficulty With This Conversation Is That It's Very Different From Most Of The Ones I've Had Of Late. Which, As I Explained, Have Mostly Been With Trees.

Time Is Bunk.

If Somebody Thinks They're A Hedgehog, Presumably You Just Give 'Em A Mirror And A Few Pictures Of Hedgehogs And Tell Them To Sort It Out For Themselves.

Flying Is Learning How To Throw Yourself At The Ground And Miss.

Cyberspace Is - Or Can Be - A Good, Friendly And Egalitarian Place To Meet.

To Be Frank, It Sometimes Seems That The American Idea Of Freedom Has More To Do With My Freedom To Do What I Want Than Your Freedom To Do What You Want. I Think That, In Europe, We're Probably Better At Understanding How To Balance Those Competing Claims, Though Not A Lot.

See First, Think Later, Then Test. But Always See First. Otherwise, You Will Only See What You Were Expecting. Most Scientists Forget That.

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.

Every Country Is Like A Particular Type Of Person. America Is Like A Belligerent, Adolescent Boy; Canada Is Like An Intelligent, 35-year-old Woman. Australia Is Like Jack Nicholson. It Comes Right Up To You And Laughs Very Hard In Your Face In A Highly Threatening And Engaging Manner.

There Is A Piece Of Me That Likes To Fondly Imagine My Maverick And Rebellious Nature. But, More Accurately, I Like To Have A Nice And Cosy Institution That I Can Rub Up Against A Little Bit.

Any Man Who Can Hitch The Length And Breadth Of The Galaxy, Rough It, Slum It, Struggle Against Terrible Odds, Win Through, And Still Knows Where His Towel Is Is Clearly A Man To Be Reckoned With.

The Guide Is Definitive. Reality Is Frequently Inaccurate.

The Impossible Often Has A Kind Of Integrity Which The Merely Improbable Lacks.

We Have Normality. I Repeat, We Have Normality. Anything You Still Can't Cope With Is Therefore Your Own Problem.

I Don't Believe It. Prove It To Me And I Still Won't Believe It.

Wandering Around The Web Is Like Living In A World In Which Every Doorway Is Actually One Of Those Science Fiction Devices Which Deposit You In A Completely Different Part Of The World When You Walk Through Them. In Fact, It Isn't Like It, It Is It.

The Mere Thought Hadn't Even Begun To Speculate About The Merest Possibility Of Crossing My Mind.

After Ten Years Of Word Processing, I Can't Even Do Hand Writing Anymore.

In Order To Fly, All One Must Do Is Simply Miss The Ground.

I Find The Difference, For Me, Between Having No Money And Having Quite A Bit Is That The Bills Get Bigger. And That's It. The Lifestyle Doesn't Change.