Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.
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I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.
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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 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 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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People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.
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A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.
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Soon it won't be the Internet any more, it'll just be like air, like somehow they'll integrate the Internet into the air. And God's name will have ended up being 'Google,' because that's the way it worked out. It could have worked out that God's name ended up being 'Yahoo,' of course, but they lost out.
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Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.
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Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
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'Hang on a second-you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?''Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up.'
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I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.
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Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.
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It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.
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I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.
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Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.
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Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)
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My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.
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I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store.
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Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.
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A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.
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Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing.
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Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.
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Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.