Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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.
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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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I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.
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...when you're in love, all of your doors are open, and all of their doors are open. And you roller-skate down your halls together.
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I've got 911 on speed dial.
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Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.
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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.
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To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
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I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.
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We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.
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I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.
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You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.
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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.
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'Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh.''That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?'
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Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.
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I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
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Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.
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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.
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Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, 'You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story.' (p. 177)
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'I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather .... Could the situation be that we no long believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaven in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can't help but suffer in comparison.'
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The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.
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Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.
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I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.
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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.