Douglas Coupland Quotes
-
I think half the people who get married now have met online. If I think about all the people in my life who married - they met online, online, online. And it makes sense if you think about it, because you fill out this form of 35 things that really define you and - bam - look, you've got two people who match. It works.
-
Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.
-
Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.
-
The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.
-
I'm suspicious of places that look decorated. I can understand why people do it, but you see too many cushions or a piece of fabric hanging and it's, like, 'Ugh!' A good house with good art will always work, no matter what.
-
There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.
-
In the future, IKEA will become an ever more spiritual sanctuary. In the future, your dream life will increasingly look like Google street view. Everyone will be feeling the same way as you, and there's some comfort to be found there.
-
Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.
-
Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
-
'Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?''Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.''To what end?''It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.'
-
Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.
-
For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.
-
Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.
-
My father has never once asked me a question, any question. There's a freedom that came from that. It allowed me to create my own way of thinking.
-
A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.
-
Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.
-
Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.
-
It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.
-
Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.
-
'A girl can’t control who will and who won’t fall in love with her, Ethan. And sometimes, when a nuisance person falls in love with you, it can be awfully… awkward.'
-
The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.
-
Twinkies are more natural than most TV-interview shows.
-
I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.
-
Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village - locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back - so as to experience relief when one returns back to 'the present.'