Douglas Adams, author of the seminal Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, would have been 64 today. In honor of the sci-fi writer and humorist's birthday, here are some of his best quotes.
• "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."
• "I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer." - Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996)
(Photo : Tumblr)
• "For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981)
• "A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - Interview in The Daily Nexus (2000), reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt
• "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981)
• "The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And ... the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned."
• "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981)
• "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981)
• "If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don't. It's like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don't hurt it. Not even major surgery if it's done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make." - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)
• "We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it." - Speech delivered at the University of California recorded by UCTV (2001)
And don't forget - the answer to the universe and everything is always, and forever, the number 42.
Photo of Douglas Adams: michael hughes | Flickr
