Douglas Adams Quotes

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.

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.

We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He’s not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.

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.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?

I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’

2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change.

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

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

I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

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.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

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.