Douglas Adams Writing Quotations

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.

I find that writing is a constant battle with exactly the same problems you've always had.

Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on. He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels. He loved talking to audiences. He liked writing screenplays. He liked being at the cutting edge of technology and inventing

The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself." "Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

The more I think about our species the more I think we just do stuff and make up explanations later when asked. But it's not true that I would rather write than read. I would rather read than write. To be honest I would rather hang upside down in a bucket than write.

I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I’ve thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.