Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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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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 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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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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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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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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I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.
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We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.
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You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.
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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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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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I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
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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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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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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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Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.
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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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I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.
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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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If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.