Douglas Coupland Quotes

I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.

I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment
that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.

Once you see someone lose it, you can never look at them the same way again.

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior - greed and stupidity and anger - and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human ... I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds - of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

[...] we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.

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.

I think God is how you deal with everything that's out of your own control.

You know, from what I've seen, at twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional. And by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful. By thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.

As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

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.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

Could I ever be a Craig? No. A person must be born into Craigdom, with its multiple ski holidays, complex orthodontia, proper nutrition and casual, healthy view of recreational sex. My

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one.

People are leaky.

I wish I could say that success turns people into plastic dolls, but the truth is that I don't know any successful people

My house. It's kind of eccentric. It's two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.

LET'S JUST HOPE WE ACCIDENTALLY BUILD GOD.

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.

BRAZILIFICATION:The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.

Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental
that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.

Leslie entered the lounge like a taller, studlier version of the Kentucky Fried Chicken colonel.

There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.

I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store.

I saw doves and I thought they were rocks, but they were asleep. My breath made them stir, and they rocks took flight, the earth exploding ... and my only thought was that I wanted you to see them, too.

The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are.

Besides, animals don't even have time. Only humans have time. It's what makes us different.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

The only way to the top is killing and greed. Okay, I'm kidding. But killing helps.

The more you want something to happen, the harder it becomes.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

This is not ambition. This is desperation.

I walked far down a dirt side road and into a farmer's field - some sort of cereal that was chest high and corn green and rustled as its blades inflicted small paper burns on my skin as I walked through them. And in that field, when the appointed hour, minute, and second of the darkness came, I lay myself down on the ground, surrounded by the tall pithy grain stalks and the faint sound of insects, and held my breath, there experiencing a mood that I have never really been able to shake completely - a mood of darkness and inevitability and facination - a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.

But I guess the nice thing about driving a car is that the physical act of driving itself occupies a good chunk of brain cells that otherwise would be giving you trouble overloading your thinking. New scenery continually erases what came before; memory is lost, shuffled, relabeled and forgotten. Gum is chewed; buttons are pushed; windows are lowered and opened. A fast moving car is the only place where you're legally allowed to not deal with your problems. It's enforced meditation and this is good.

[ ... ] and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very quickly; all of us have far more in common than we do not have in common.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

So where do you start when you want to start your life again?

Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events - a story - and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.

Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question mark stamped on it - a demand for people to reach a finer place

Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.

I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.

Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

All systems have failed me. In five
minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara
Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and
heaven begins.

Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.

My brain feels like a cool, deep lake.

Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library - a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying 'Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,' you'd follow them.

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

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.

I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?

I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.

Gore is nature's way of saying, There are too many human beings on the planet, and I'm trying to rectify this any way I can. SARS didn't work, but trust me, I'm cooking up something better. In the interim, please kill lots of yourselves.

One of the biggest indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of the crazy genes, you don't end up crazy; you merely end up different. And it's that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successfull.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you'll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway.

I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere's a research library and I can't get an elitist kick from it any more.

Mphhh ... What did you say Tyler?' Anna-Louise mumbles on the bed above me.
I stand up, and a tame blue bird lands on my shoulder and tries to nibble my earlobe. I gently shake Anna-Louise fully awake. 'Anna-Louise, wake-up,' I say. 'Wake up
the world is alive.

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.

Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.

Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'

I was convinced that all of the people I'd ever gone to school with were headed for great things in life and I wasn't. They were having more fun; finding more meaning in life.

You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work.

We're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change
and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

I'm agoraphobic. I can't deal with crowds.

Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.

In our heads we're all about 33 years old.

Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.

Anti-sabbatical: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments - we hear a word that sticks in our mind - or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly - we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen - or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection - certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn't even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real - this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.

There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.

Sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e, 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to *now*, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.

I say 'Uhmm...' a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it's a CPU word. It means you're assembling data in your head - spooling.

OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else.

My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.

Now: I am an affectionate man but I have much trouble showing it.

When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone - of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship, of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn't be seen - because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.

Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting - the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.

For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going on inside of someone else's head other than my own I was going to explode.

Sometimes I think God is like weather - you may not like
the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness
and grief are part of being human and always will be.

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.

I hate math. It's hard, it's stupid, and it's nature's way of separating spinsters from women who end up breeding.

I tried to think of a witty play on Every picture tells a thousand words, but then the whole word/picture thing collapsed on me.

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.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.