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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.
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland
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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.
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland -
People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland -
'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.'
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland
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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?'
Douglas Coupland -
Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland -
Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.
Douglas Coupland -
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
Douglas Coupland
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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.
Douglas Coupland -
One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
Douglas Coupland -
Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing.
Douglas Coupland -
Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland -
'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.'
Douglas Coupland
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My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.
Douglas Coupland -
Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible. (p. 80)
Douglas Coupland -
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.
Douglas Coupland -
The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.
Douglas Coupland