I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

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.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

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

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

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.

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 drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

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.

I'm spending a year dead for tax reasons.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

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

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

Time is bunk.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can't fix the weather - you just have to get on with it.

Life is wasted on the living.

Books are sharks... because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy; Canada is like an intelligent, 35-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

In order to fly, all one must do is simply miss the ground.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

The mere thought hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.

I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.

See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise, you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

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

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

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.

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.

Cyberspace is - or can be - a good, friendly and egalitarian place to meet.

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.

I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He's not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn't anything going on on the outside!

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us.'

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

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.

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.

I have rooms full of little dongly things and don't want any more. Half the little dongly things I've got, I don't even know what gizmo they're for. More importantly, half the gizmos I've got, I don't know where their little dongly thing is.

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.

I wanted to be a writer-performer like the Pythons. In fact, I wanted to be John Cleese, and it took me some time to realise that the job was, in fact, taken.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we're probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

I used to be a great fan of doing crosswords. When you're fiddling around with anagrams, you get wonderful jumbles of syllables that become interesting.