Douglas Coupland Quotes
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I can't switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I'm always so zonked that I can't appreciate it. It's like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road.
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My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
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Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.
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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.
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The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will.
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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.
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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.
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Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.
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Any passion to collect has some meaning behind it.
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Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.
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'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.'
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Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
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We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
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I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one.
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Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.
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What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?
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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.
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Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.
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Twinkies are more natural than most TV-interview shows.
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Ethan is annoyed with all of these dumb campaigns that indoctrinate millions of people into thinking they’re tough-guy free spirits when, in fact, there’s probably much to be said for following and, in any event, the food chain isn’t structured to encompass millions of non-followers.
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Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.
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The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.
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The hardest things in the world are being unique and having your life be a story. In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.
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I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.