For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two – and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was...
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
And so the Universe ended.
The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.
The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.
It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like but don’t. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?
Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes our ends.
It’s guff. It doesn’t advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn’t actually get you anywhere.
Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren’t up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up.
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.
He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.
He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. “I will go mad!” he annouced.
I teleported home last night with Ron and Sid and Meg Ron stole Meggy’s heart away and I got Sidney’s leg.
Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.
The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music, and the distant sound of warring police tribes.
If everyone knew exactly what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there?
See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it’s art while it’s being created.
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.” It’s funny.
Being literate as a writer is good craft, is knowing your job, is knowing how to use your tools properly and not to damage the tools as you use them.