All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was." "No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.

Why' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it. The alphabet does not go 'A B C D What? When? How?' but it does go 'V W X Why? Z.

The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making.

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

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.

'Totally mad,' he said, 'utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense.'

What is this? Some sort of galactic hyperhearse?