‘you’d just have to program it to say What? and I don’t understand and Where’s the tea? – who’d know the difference?’

‘A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.’

‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’

the best writers, I think, don’t forget. They carry that childlike lunacy with them forever, its joy and its danger, and Hitchhiker’s is packed with that unique energy,

only vestiges left in Mr L. Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about.

All kids invent stories. They imagine games of War, or Doctor Who and the Daleks, or the wonderful logic of Off Ground Touch. But then hormones and kissing and spots take over,

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

‘Ford,’ he said, ‘there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.’