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

If you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

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.

If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.

Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.

The story goes that I first had the idea for The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck.

I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.