Douglas Coupland Quotes
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When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
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Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state.
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Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.
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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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'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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The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.
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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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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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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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There's nothing at the center of what we do.
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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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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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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 miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.
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If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.
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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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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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I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.
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There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.
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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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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 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?
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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.