Douglas Adams

"I find the difference, for me, between having no money and having quite a bit is that the bills get bigger. And that's it. The lifestyle doesn't change."

"I think the idea of art kills creativity."

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

"Time is bunk."

"Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the Web."

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

"Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use."

"Ever since Newton, we've done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we're now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication."

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

"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."

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

"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands."

"Life is wasted on the living."

"Of course you can't 'trust' what people tell you on the web anymore than you can 'trust' what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do."

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."

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

"There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But, more accurately, I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit."

"Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which 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."

"When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty."

"Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do."