'For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.'
Born in Cambridge, England, Adams attended Brentwood School in Essex. He was six feet tall by the time he was twelve years old and stopped growing five inches later. He was the only student ever to be awarded a ten out of ten by Halford, his Form Master, for creative writing, something he remembered for the rest of his life, particularly when facing writer's block.
'I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.'
Some of his earliest writing was published whilst he was still at school, most notably spoof reviews in the school magazine, Broadsheet, edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, who later became a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide.
'My name is Kate Schechter. Two 'c's, two 'h's, two 'e's, and also a 't', an 'r', and an 's'. Provided they're all there the bank won't be fussy about the order they come in. They never seem to know themselves.'
A poem entitled "A Dissertation on the task of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto pertaining" written by Adams in January 1970, at the age of 17, was discovered by archivist Stacey Harmer in a cupboard at the school in early 2014. In it, Adams rhymes "futile" with "mute, while" and "exhausted" with "of course did."
'The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.'
Adams attended St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1971, and graduated three years and three essays later with a BA in English Literature.
'There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. 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, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.'
In November 1974, two episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus were broadcast, both featuring cameo appearances from Adams himself. He is credited for writing the Patient 45 skit, and a sketch by Adams features on the album for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
'Driving a Porschè in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game.'
Without question, Douglas Adams is most well known for writing The Hitchhiker's Guide. It was originally a radio series, but is more famous in novel form. The idea for the title occurred to him whilst he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, gazing at the stars. He was carrying a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, and it occurred to him that "somebody ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". He later said that the constant repetition of this anecdote had obliterated his memory of the actual event.
'The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.'
Never a fan of deadlines, Adams was quoted as saying, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." In spite of that though, he did manage to write and publish the five novels in the original Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy of five in 1979, 1980, 1982, 1984, and 1992.
'There's no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.'
He wrote many other novels, too, including the Dirk Gently trilogy, as well as three Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who, none of which have been novelised due to Adams' reluctance to allow anyone else to write for him.
'For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.'
Adams was the first – or the second, either before or after Stephen Fry – person in Europe to own an Apple computer, and used Macs until the day that he died.
'That quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.'
On May 25th, 2001, two weeks after his death, his fans organised 'Towel Day,' a celebration of Adams' life and work which is observed annually.
'It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.'
The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of his unpublished and incomplete work, was published posthumously, in 2002.
'A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over.'
