Douglas Adams Quotes

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

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‘Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.’

Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.

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

You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass.

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

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.