English writer & humorist (1952-2001)
Science fiction that's just about people wandering around in space ships shooting each other with ray guns is very dull. I like it when it enables you to do fairly radical reinterpretations of human experience, just to show all the different interpretations that can be put on apparently fairly simple and commonplace events. That I find fun.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
"Douglas Adams: The First and Last Tapes", Darker Matter: Online Science Fiction Magazine
Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Mostly Harmless
What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
original radio script, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it right.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Life, the Universe and Everything
When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
"Douglas Adams: The First and Last Tapes", Darker Matter: Online Science Fiction Magazine
There is an art ... or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Life, the Universe and Everything
Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Life is wasted on the living.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Mostly Harmless
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
Life! Don't talk to me about life.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
American Atheist Magazine, winter 1998-1999
The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
"Mostly Harmless"
Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth it for end users, however much fun it is for nerds.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Salmon of Doubt
There is an art to flying ... or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe