Douglas Coupland Quotes
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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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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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Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.
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I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.
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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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When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
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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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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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Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.
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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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'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 time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
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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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I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.
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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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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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Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.
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Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.
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The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.
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All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.
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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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Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.
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If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.