Top 115 Douglas Coupland Quotes

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.

I’m not patient – and I’m getting more impatient as I get older – but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: ‘He wasn’t patient, but he was disciplined.’

I’ve always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it’s a permanent state, and I’m still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

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.

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.

Flying dreams mean that you’re doing the right thing with your life.

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.

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

If cats were double the size they are now, they’d probably be illegal.

The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one’s will.

Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early – and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother’s side of the family in myself for the first time.

No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.

‘Stupidity’ defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we’ve never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we’ve never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that’s emerging?

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

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

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.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey’s paw in disguise. Most people can’t handle a structureless life.

Men won’t read any email from a woman that’s over 200 words long.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

When you write, it’s just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with – though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It’s the poetry part of you.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it’s not quite the same thing.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

Any passion to collect has some meaning behind it.

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.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one’s taking.

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people’s families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.

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.

Star Trek characters never go shopping.

I know it’s not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that’s not even art, but something universal and bigger.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

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

I always thought of words as art supplies.

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

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?

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.

If I don’t learn something new every year, I go crazy.

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

It also allows you to look as though you’re not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

Those Catholics, they really nab you when you’re young. They sear you. They sear you; they do.

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.

I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.

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.

Nobody likes being told who or what they are.

Games I do find interesting for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don’t listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They’re games. They prepare you for nothing.

The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don’t take them, the universe says to itself, ‘Oh I see, this person doesn’t like opportunities’ and stops giving them to you.

On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they’re listening to what you’re saying, you’re off the screen.

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there’s nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It’s the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C’s and D’s. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.

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 think the killers get far too much attention.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

We really ought to give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a universe of constant media change and mutation.

It’s very strange that most people don’t care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

Your body isn’t just a body. It’s an ecosystem.

It’s difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it’s been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

Some people think fashion is frivolous but it’s not… it’s just that some ideas come and go quickly, and that’s the nature of the language of fashion.

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

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.