Douglas Coupland Quotations

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.

I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one.

I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

Bespoke tailoring: yes! I found this one pair of pants - they're Canali - and brought them into a tailor and said, 'Clone these, dammit.' They just do all the right things. I've got eight pairs in different colors and I never have to think about pants again. The only look otherwise that suits me is, like, the Professor from 'Gilligan's Island.'

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.

Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.

Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.

In Canada, we're happy to provide a safe haven for next-door neighbors in the middle of a marital dispute. And if anyone trips while crossing the border, we're happy to set their broken bones for free.

Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'

Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you're a writer - do you want a special pen compartment or something?' Bespoke: That's the term you want to get out there.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.

Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time.

When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.

I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it.

Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.

I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.

I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to.

Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.

Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

Soon it won't be the Internet any more, it'll just be like air, like somehow they'll integrate the Internet into the air. And God's name will have ended up being 'Google,' because that's the way it worked out. It could have worked out that God's name ended up being 'Yahoo,' of course, but they lost out.

Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.

The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.

Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.

Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.

TV didn't kill radio, it just added something new to the mix.

Twinkies are more natural than most TV-interview shows.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.

I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: 'He wasn't patient, but he was disciplined.'