Literary Birthday – 11 March – Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams was born on 11 March 1952 and died on 11 May 2001.

Douglas Adams Quotes

1. In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
2. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
3. Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.
4. I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it’s less good than what I do, there’s no point in reading it, if it’s better than what I do it makes me depressed. If it’s like something I’m intending to write I have to twist myself into knots trying to avoid it and if it’s like something I have written I feel ripped off. Simpler to read something else.
5. I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.
6. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide has not been an opera. It has however been a tapestry, if you count a woven bath towel as a tapestry.
7. We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
8. It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
9. I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.
10. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
11. 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.
12. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Suggested reading: 10 Tips For Writers From Douglas Adams & Douglas Adams On The Difficulties Of Writing

Douglas Adams was an English author of speculative fiction. He is best known as the author of the mock-science fiction series, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime. It also became a television series, was adapted into several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and a feature film. Adams also satirised the detective-story genre with the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency series. His satirical books usually feature a luckless protagonist who deals ineptly with forces beyond his control. Adams’s writing is characterised by wordplay and witty asides which diverge from the main plot. His chief literary influence was humourist P. G. Wodehouse. He was also writer and script editor for the television series Doctor Who and wrote scripts for the BBC from 1978 to 1980.

Source for Image: Michael Hughes, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Douglas_adams_portrait_cropped.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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