Douglas Adams Quotes

If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.

U2's best work has always been when we didn't know what we're doing.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

I think if I try to develop a formula, it ends up not working.

I do not see myself, I never make plans, I never set goals, and I never do that kind of stuff; I don't like to futurize, I barely know what I will do tomorrow, and because there is a working plan here, I've never futurized because life always surprises me with things even better.

I like life to surprise me.

No dance has ever turned out the way I thought it would, because I trust enough that I can start something with some ideas and then it takes itself somewhere.

You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

I never make a choice thinking about the results. I'm never gonna take a role or a project thinking where this could - what this could bring me or something like that, because you've got no control about anything, actually.

So much of making movies is about discovery on the day, what you're figuring out. If you know everything going in, then it's not worth doing - it's already done.

My plan is to have no plan. If you know what plan you have, life has its own ideas and will take you in any direction it pleases. So my idea about life is to just be open to it and to go with the flow and go with my gut.

As much as you try to organize your life, life will surprise you.

I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.

I wanna keep people on their toes, and that's just kind of how we've always operated.

Projects you think are no-brainers stall, and other things see the light of day. You never count anything out.

I try to hang on to as much mystery as possible. How can we go through our lives not wanting to have any element of surprise?’

Failure is information-we label it failure, but it's more like, 'This didn't work, I'm a problem solver, and I'll try something else.'

Every start on an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to succeed.

I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions...It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go. As a thing, an object, it accedes to its non-logical self. It is something, it is nothing.

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

We always seem to be surprised by events, especially by catastrophes, but also by wonderful events. Look at 1990, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and apartheid in South Africa collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. I don't know anyone who foresaw those events. It seems to me that as a species we are constantly trying to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. In the meantime, we talk as if we are in control, and we're not. This seems to me to be the truth about the twentieth century.

Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.