Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, scriptwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist and dramatist.
[The Head of Radio Three] had been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the phrase "too much Mozart" was, given any reasonable definition of those three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy.
42 is a nice number that you can take home and introduce to your family.
People always make this totally artificial distinction between what is commercial and what is good. They quote that maxim "Nobody ever lost money underestimating the public's taste" and I think that's very wrongheaded. I like to believe the audience is actually intelligent, because it's made up of other people like yourself.
We're not obsessed by anything, you see," insisted Ford. ". . . " "And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win. " "I care about lots of things," said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty. "Such as?" "Well," said the old man, "life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords. " "Would you die for them?" "Fjords?" blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. "No. " "Well then. " "Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world.
I'm 48, which is a bit of a shock to me. Why only last year I thought I was a precocious young thing!
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
The idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantastically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had been strenuously bent to fit.
What was the self-sacrifice?" I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes. " Why was that self-sacrifice?" Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly. I think we have different value systems. " Well mine's better.
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and satisfied, drove on into the night.
You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognize. Hmmm. So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business as usual , I suppose.
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.
I don't go to mythical places with strange men.
In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was "nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation," or to put it another way--as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career--the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was.
I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.
God's Final Message to His Creation: 'We apologize for the inconvenience.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.