So, the vaguely uncomfortable feeling you got from sitting on a seat which is warm from somebody else’s bottom is just as real a feeling as the one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you, but hitherto only the latter has actually had a word for it. The first one is ‘shoeburyness,’ and the second, of course, is ‘fear.’
Douglas Adams on the creation of The Meaning of Liff, originally published in the Pan Promotion News, October 1983. Reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time.
First of all, realise that it’s very hard, and that writing is a grueling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next, you have to write something. Unless you are committed to novel writing exclusively, I suggest that you start out writing for radio. It’s still a relatively easy medium to get into because it pays so badly. But it is a great medium for writers because it relies so much on the imagination.
Douglas Adams on becoming an author, appended to the introduction to The Original Hitchhiker Scripts, as published in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time.
The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.
Douglas Adams, “Tea,” as published in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
