“He spent a lot of time flying.He learnt to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.”

“He learned to communicate with birds and discovered their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with windspeed, wingspans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries.”

“They've discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold," he said, in a sudden blur of coherence."You're kidding.""Oh yes," he said, "no," he corrected himself, "they have."He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely."Have you been to California?" he demanded. "Do you know the sort of stuff they do there?"Three members of his audience said they had and that he was talking nonsense."You haven't seen anything," insisted Arthur. "Oh yes," he added, because someone was offering to buy another round.”

“One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both.”

“Как да напуснем планетата:1. Обадете се на НАСА.Номерът им е (713) 493 - 3111.Обяснете им,че се налага да се махнете спешно оттук.2. Ако откажат да съдействат,обадете се на някой познат в Белия дом - (202) 456 - 1414 - да бутне едно рамо при момчетата от НАСА.3. Ако нямате познати в Белия дом,обадете се в Кремъл (поискайте международен разговор с (0107 - 095 - 295 - 9051).Те и те нямат приятели в НАСА(поне не такива,които да си струват обсъждането),но май имат известно влияние,така че пробвайте.5. Ако и това не стане,поискайте съвет от папата.Телефонът му е (011 - 39 - 6 - 6982) и ,доколото знам, телефонната му централа е безотказна.6. Ако всичките ви опити пропаднат,стопирайте някоя летяща чиния и им обяснете,че трябва на всяка цена да се махнете преди да е дошла сметката ви за телефон”

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

“You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.”