Top 400 Douglas Adams Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people pick their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets.”

— Douglas Adams

402. “Why?’ is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.”

— Douglas Adams

403. “But it was the chance carelessness of it which particularly appealed to Dirk because words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.”

— Douglas Adams

404. “But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn’t have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fiberoptics. It’s communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand.”

— Douglas Adams

405. “So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I’ve forgotten.”

— Douglas Adams

406. “The phone rang and Janice answered it. “Good afternoon,” she said, “Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.”

— Douglas Adams

407. “If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how?”

— Douglas Adams

408. “That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I’ve been counting.” He.”

— Douglas Adams

409. “She had nearly said, “Over what?,” but at that moment she realized that if she said that she would have to listen to his reply, which would be bound to infuriate her into arguing back. It occurred to her for the first time that the only way of escaping was just not to get drawn into these arguments. If she simply did not respond this time, then she was free to leave. She tried it. She felt a sudden freedom. She left. A week later, in much the.”

— Douglas Adams

410. “I guess when the novel started, most early novels were just sort of pornography: Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add.”

— Douglas Adams

411. “The little book of instructions suggested that he should simply concentrate ‘soulfully’ on the question which was ‘besieging’ him, write it down, ponder on it, enjoy the silence, and then once he had achieved inner harmony and tranquillity he should push the red button. There wasn’t a red button, but there was a blue button marked ‘Red’, and this Dirk took to be the one.”

— Douglas Adams

412. “Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it.”

— Douglas Adams

413. “Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, “popular” was hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the motorway might be popular – everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.”

— Douglas Adams

414. “The stories had claimed that people in the area had been “terrorized” by some repulsively deformed “goblinlike” creature who regularly broke out of the Woodshead and committed an impressively wide range of unspeakable acts.”

— Douglas Adams

415. “There was a distinct absence of anything female in the room – the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on a wall.”

— Douglas Adams

416. “The theology of this seemed a little confused, reflected Dirk, but what was one tiny extra droplet of misinformation in such a raging torrent?”

— Douglas Adams

417. “MacDuff I knew at Cambridge.” “Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.” “Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that’s given up preying and taken up tennis instead.”

— Douglas Adams

418. “He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the time.”

— Douglas Adams

419. “It was odd, Kate reflected, that people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around.”

— Douglas Adams

420. “Very strange people, physicists,” he said as soon as they were outside again. “In my experience the ones who aren’t actually dead are in some way very ill.”

— Douglas Adams

421. “Bianchi lenzuoli irlandesi, appena inamidati, puliti, stirati, ben rimboccati – questi aggettivi erano per lui come una litania di desiderio. Da secoli nulla l’aveva attratto come ora le lenzuola. Non riusciva assolutamente a concepire come si potesse desiderare qualcos’altro. Lenzuola. E dormire. Dormire e lenzuola. Dormire nelle lenzuola. Dormire.”

— Douglas Adams

422. “He had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did.”

— Douglas Adams

423. “Of course, the computer isn’t any of these things. These are all things we were previously familiar with from the real world, which we have modelled in the computer so that we can use the damn thing. Which should tell us something interesting. The computer is actually a modelling device.”

— Douglas Adams

424. “You see what I have done?′ he asked the ceiling, which seemed to flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation.”

— Douglas Adams

425. “The man, he believed with an instant effortlessness which would have impressed even a Scientologist, must be a God of some kind to arouse such fervour.”

— Douglas Adams

426. “Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul.”

— Douglas Adams

427. “So what we have arrived at here – and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it’s really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us – is “Is there really a universe that is not designed from the top downward, but from the bottom upward? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?”

— Douglas Adams

428. “He put some more cold pizza into his face.”

— Douglas Adams

429. “A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like.”

— Douglas Adams

430. “I’ve been talking about how electronic books will come, and how important they will be, and all of a sudden Stephen King publishes one. I feel a complete idiot, as it should have been me.”

— Douglas Adams

431. “The phone wavered in Richard’s hand. He was holding it about half an inch away from his ear anyway because it seemed that somebody had dipped the earpiece in some chow mein recently, but that wasn’t so bad. It was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.”

— Douglas Adams

432. “It seems to me that the whole field of humour could benefit from close and immediate scrutiny. Clearly we need to sort out the jokes which have any kind of genuine psychological value from those which merely encourage drug abuse and should be stopped.”

— Douglas Adams

433. “It seems odd, don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness.”

— Douglas Adams

434. “Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it. Trying to work out all the implications of this is as difficult as it was for early filmmakers to work out all the implications of being able to move the camera.”

— Douglas Adams

435. “The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.”

— Douglas Adams

436. “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i – “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i – “Don’t pick it up, pick it up, pick i –.”

— Douglas Adams

437. “Stanley wasn’t a good downpour. Nothing wrong with a good downpour for clearing the air. Stanley was the sort of thing you needed a good downpour to clear the air of. Stanley was muggy, close, and oppressive, like someone large and sweaty pressed up against you in a tube train. Stanley didn’t rain, but every so often he dribbled on you. Dirk.”

— Douglas Adams

438. “He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?”

— Douglas Adams

439. “In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend it some.”

— Douglas Adams

440. “She was about to demand a full and instant explanation of this preposterous remark when a passing white Ford Sierra slowed down beside them. The driver wound down the window and leaned out. “Had a crash then?” he shouted at them. “Yes.” “Ha!” he said and drove on.”

— Douglas Adams

441. “The officer’s next point was that I wasn’t in the universe, I was in England, a point that has been made to me before.”

— Douglas Adams

442. “Big, bulbous, ruddy buildings with vast ballrooms, grand, angular staircases, and as many turrets and crenellations as a recreational condom. The.”

— Douglas Adams