The Salmon Of Doubt Quotes
"It was like being helicoptered to the top of Mount Everest, or having an orgasm without the foreplay."
"It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal."
"He once gave me ten out of ten for a story...at some fundamental level I must be able to do it."
"Anyone who knew my father will tell you that management was not something he knew very much about."
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
"The fact that Frank Halford once gave me ten out of ten, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it."
"It’s reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are."
"But I also relished the chance not to do very much."
"The logical next step was to go to Cambridge University, because I wanted to join Footlights."
"I have terrible periods of lack of confidence. I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view."
"With all due respect and love to my dear wife, there are some things that, however loving or tender your wife may be, only a large pipe band can give you."
"Given unlimited financial resources, I would love to fund a major research project into human origins, the transition from ape to man."
"Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief."
"The moon is much larger than it appears to be."
"The children had written a song about rhinos, which they then sang for us."
"If you pour milk into a cup of hot tea, you will scald the milk."
"There is no problem so complicated that you can't find a very simple answer to it if you look at it the right way."
"The computer is actually a modelling device."
"The people who have got this spectacularly right so far are the guys at Amazon."
"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works."
"I really do not believe that there is a god—in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god."
"It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly."
"The awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
"Trying to predict the future is a mug’s game."
"We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do."
"Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out."
"Time travel? I believe there are people regularly travelling back from the future."
"Present somebody with a questionnaire clipboard, and they lie."
"Is there an artificial God? I’m sure most of the people in this room will share the same view."
"The odd thing is, even as I am saying that, I am thinking, 'Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?'"
"To begin with, we wanted to do it whereby it would be text-to-speech, which gives you the advantage that you have much more flexibility in constructing sentences on the fly."
"So the way we eventually solved the problem, or gradually solved the problem, was that the amount of prerecorded speech just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger."
"People come in and spend hours just sitting, locked in conversation with these characters."
"It’s pretty remarkable when it works, you suddenly have this populated world."
"The appeal of the books to me is that it’s just me."
"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.’"
"If I want to know something interesting about the way human beings work, I’ll find an awful lot of women crime novelists who do it better."
"The most dangerous of all were three identical ones—they were put in this hold, to be blasted, with this ship, right out of this universe."
"Life was like an ocean. You can either grind your way across it like a motorboat or you can follow the winds and the currents—in other words, go sailing."
"The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want."
"Most things, the man would have told you if you had asked him, probably meant nothing."
"The sleeping keeper continued to snore. Next to him was a collection of crumpled beer cans, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and a couple of glasses."
"The dog whimpered again, and sniffed around the floor nervously."
"It looked as if something very nasty had happened to it, or was about to."
"The visitor tried gently to shake him by the shoulder, but to no avail."
"Having run out of places to leap to, the dog cowered back in a corner, quivering with fright."
"A name was just a sound you heard, and didn’t have that rich, heady reek of really being something."
"But now he felt as if the whole world were tipping backwards over his head."
"The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity were as comic in the world’s silicon valleys as anywhere else."
"He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier."