The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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

‘You know,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space, that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.’ ‘Why, what did she tell you?’ ‘I don’t know, I didn’t listen.’

‘We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber. Magrathea awakes.’

‘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?’

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

‘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.’

‘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.’

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,

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.