Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world - everyone has one and it never gets used.
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Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.
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Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.
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By your thirties, you should be doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your life and just get on with it - which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else.
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There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.
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I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.
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As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with.
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There's nothing at the center of what we do.
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It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.
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If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.
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I'm not a hoarder, I'm a collector: if you have something you like, every time you see it, you have a little happy hit.
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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.
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Comics day came and went. Another shoes day came and went. And another comics day followed that - the typical production and consumption cycles that help us survice our dismal, meaningless little lives.
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The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
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'I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.'I considered this. 'I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.'
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I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.
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I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.
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The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.
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The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
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Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
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I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.
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Bespoke tailoring: yes! I found this one pair of pants - they're Canali - and brought them into a tailor and said, 'Clone these, dammit.' They just do all the right things. I've got eight pairs in different colors and I never have to think about pants again. The only look otherwise that suits me is, like, the Professor from 'Gilligan's Island.'
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Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
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The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?