Canadians can easily ‘pass for American’ as long as we don’t accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.
Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.
TV didn’t kill radio, it just added something new to the mix.
Data transmission is no longer something scary you don’t want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.
Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.
My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
I’ve got 911 on speed dial.
Aliens didn’t come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.
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.
There’s much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world’s probably a better place for it.
A ring is a halo on your finger.
Much of what we now consider ‘personality’ will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
Once you see someone lose it, you can never look at them the same way again.
High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.
God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.
As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible – sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.
Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn’t exist, but it does. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn’t help anything. We can only go forward.
I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.
Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, ‘Well you’re a writer – do you want a special pen compartment or something?’ Bespoke: That’s the term you want to get out there.
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. Well, what can you do about it? Next.
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
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.
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It’s like your family. You don’t have to like them, but you have to love them.
Most time capsules, when they’re unearthed, are really awful. There’s nothing good in them.
Failure is authentic, and because it’s authentic, it’s real and genuine, and because of that, it’s a pure state of being.
You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.
My house. It’s kind of eccentric. It’s two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.
The modern economy isn’t about the redistribution of wealth, it’s about the redistribution of time.
Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?
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.
Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.
When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they’re going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they’re going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.
Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.
Forget about being world famous, it’s hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.
If you’re not a tree hugger, then you’re a what, a tree hater?
The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.
I think most people either forget or don’t know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.’s well over 130.
I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.
The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.
A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.
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.
There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.
Thinking you’re immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.
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