Douglas Coupland Quotes
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I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.
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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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In my mind, I've always checked out in 2037; that's always been my expiration date. I'll be 75.
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Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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'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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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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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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Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
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My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.
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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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I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.
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The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
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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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One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
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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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Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.
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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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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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Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)