"What's up?" "I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."

The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye.

If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terrible bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

He inched his way up the corridor as if he would rather be yarding his way down it, which was true.

He felt like an old sponge steeped in paraffin and left in the sun to dry.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.