This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.
My universe is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay.
Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.
She had what it took: great hair, a profound understanding of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care.
Even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.
We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.
In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.
Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.
The difficulty with this conversation is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees.
Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around.
I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you’ve always had.
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does.
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.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
I’m spending a year dead for tax reasons.