I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is...

The Answer to the Great Question Of…..Life, the Universe and Everything…..(is) Forty-two.

The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the phone.

It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don’t. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.

This must be Thursday,’ said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. ‘I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

So the hours are pretty good then?’ he resumed.The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.Yeah,’ he said, ‘but now you come to mention it, most of the...

The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his way through it.

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...

There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers what exactly the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even...

Why can’t people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?’ said Arthur. / Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh. / ‘Forty-two!’ he said with a malicious grin, ‘No, doesn’t work. Never mind.

After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur’s mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with.He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him...

You’re a jerk,’ repeated the alien, ‘a complete asshole.

The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them...

I’d far rather be happy than right any day.

Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied.

Time is bunk.

The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79

For a moment, nothing happened.Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which...

So this is it,” said Arthur, “We are going to die.””Yes,” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he...

My capacity for happiness,” he added, “you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first

and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.

He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers for the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones until...

Conceited little mega-puppy.

And as they drifter up their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to...

I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he...

Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they’d settled on.

Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s...

To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.

The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp...

In other words – and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher… or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola

On the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small tray, on which say three bone china cups and saucers, a bone china jug of milk, a silver teapot full of the best...

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem,...

you go to pieces so fast people get hit by the shrapnel.

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living.

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire “intelligent” population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree...