Douglas Coupland Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I'm not a psychiatrist.
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I had been doing summer stock every summer while I was in college. We did a showcase, like most good conservatories do - monologues and things that agents and casting directors come to see. From that I got an agent.
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The one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals.
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Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
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I knew it would break his heart if I didn't go into the business.
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It's not enough to just mildly want what you want. You must wildly want what you want. Nobody ever got their greatest wishes by being wishy-washy. You need to put extreme energy into your power of intention to win what you wanna win.
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A people cannot long retain their freedom, whose government is incapable of protecting them.
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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
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It's understandable why TV hasn't been diverse because a lot of TV writers are white dudes from Harvard. And white dudes from Harvard aren't going to immediately want to write about trans issues. They're not immediately going to want to write about a Filipino family.
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When you're in trouble, all you need is your bank card and passport, and you're fine.
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Especially in comedies, I think a lot of time the female characters are there to provide a balance for guys.
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The spiritual is the cause of action. Action is life.
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The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
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It's not enough to have economic growth. You have to distribute wealth throughout all of society.
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The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.
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We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the game.
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I started out doing musicals.
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The names of common flowers change from decade to decade, so I spent a lot of time with old outdated dictionaries, with awful flower names like 'mouse-eared chickweed.'
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The life of Lord Krishna has been misunderstood by many Western commentators. Scriptural allegory is baffling to literal minds. A hilarious blunder by a translator will illustrate this point. The story concerns an inspired medieval saint, the cobbler Ravidas, who sang in the simple terms of his own trade of the spiritual glory hidden in all mankind:
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TV is like a school. It is easy to shoot for a film. In movies, you have a definite start and end. You know your character is there for a particular period.
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It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self--ceases. I don't know how to say it. But I believe that the reality--the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort and happiness--that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.
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...in general, the traditionalists are backward-looking, conservative; pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
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We must learn the difficult lesson that the future of Mankind will only be tolerable when our course, in world affairs as in others, is based upon justice and law rather than the threat of naked power.
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In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
