Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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.
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Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.
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'Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.'
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… after you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? … What moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet?
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When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?
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When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.
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It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.
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Purchased experiences don't count.
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My house. It's kind of eccentric. It's two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.
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Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.
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Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic - they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes.
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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.
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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.
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When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.
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Quick. Name ten dead redheads.
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Once you see someone lose it, you can never look at them the same way again.
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Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall floor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete.
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I always thought of words as art supplies.
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'You have to admit, half the people who work here are mildly autistic; poor social skills, the ability to obsess on anything numerical or repetitive, the odd outfits, the paranoia and the sense of continually being judged and measured.'
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Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.
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My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'
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The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I’m kidding. But killing helps.
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I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.
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My own experience with being interviewed is mixed. I suppose they're a part of my job, and as I would like readers to connect with my books, I do them. I've also made many lifelong friends whom I first encountered as interviewers - as a writer, they're a terrific way to meet and add smart new people to one's life.