The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams (1979)

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

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

The ships hung in the sky in the same way that bricks don't.

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little nob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes.

If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

'The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat [...]

'So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed. [...]

'Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy [...]

'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.'

Trillian had come to suspect that the main reason why he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.