Douglas Coupland Quotes
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''Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.'
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When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun...But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.
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I like doing radio because it's so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you're inside there heads, not only that, you're in there laying eggs.
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If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.
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You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.
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It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.
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If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?
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If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?
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As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.
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Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.
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If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.
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Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but hucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.
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No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.
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If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.
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Some people think fashion is frivolous but it's not... it's just that some ideas come and go quickly, and that's the nature of the language of fashion.
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Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.
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Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village - locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back - so as to experience relief when one returns back to 'the present.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.'
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Every single moment is a coincidence.
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New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.
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When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.