Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.
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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.
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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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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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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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Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.
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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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Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
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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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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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'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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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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My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.
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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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Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.
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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 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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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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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 have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.
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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.