There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." It's funny.

It's part of the shape of the Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate me.

I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere I needed to be.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two - and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

...they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ulimate it.