The Guide says there is an art to flying”, said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying “Blood…blood…blood…blood…

But unless we determine to take action,’ said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, ‘then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care...

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.

The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

That young girl is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought...

Where do you get inspiration for your books?I tell myself I can’t have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea.

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says...

Sorry, did I say something wrong?” said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. “Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don’t know why I bother to say it, oh God I’m so...

Why’s this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.

But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a...

The mice were furious.”[…]”Oh yes,” said the old man mildly.”Yes well so I expect were the dogs and cats and duckbilled platypuses, but…””Ah, but they hadn’t paid for it you see, had they?””Look,” said Arthur,...

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

I don’t know what this great thing I’m meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right? “The old me knew....

It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously.

For instance, on the planet Earth, 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...

Forty-two!” yelled Loonquawl. “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?” “I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think...

Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.”Is there any tea on this spaceship?” he asked.

Life is wasted on the living.

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

People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.

The light was only just visible – except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.

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

No, that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.

Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn’t just jump over and have done with it.

Don’t Panic.

Why?’ is always the most difficult question to answer. You know where you are when someone asks you ‘What’s the time?’ or ‘When was the battle of 1066?’ or ‘How do these seatbelts work that...

In the center lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn’t lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot.

Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.

He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.

The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat.

When I was young I used to have this nightmare about dying. I used to lie awake at night screaming. All my schoolfriends went to heaven or hell, and I was sent to Southend.

A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it...

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a...

It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.” “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

We already have the Wooden Pillar, the Steel Pillar and the Plastic Pillar. In a moment we will have the Golden Bail….’No, you won’t.’We will,’ stated the robot simply.No, you won’t. It makes my ship...

In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the...

A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought haughtily. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.

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.

Life is like a grapefruit. Well, it’s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have a half a one...

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like...

Share and Enjoy’ is the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium-sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation...

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.