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Douglas Coupland Quotes
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Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist and artist. His fiction is complemented by recognized works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized terms such as McJob and Generation X. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for Financial Times. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, Dis, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Villa Stuck.Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the Order of British Columbia. He published his thirteenth novel Worst. Person. Ever. in 2012. He also released an updated version of City of Glass and a biography of Marshall McLuhan for Penguin Canada in their Extraordinary Canadians series, called Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. He is the presenter of the 2010 Massey Lectures, and a companion novel to the lectures, Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland has been longlisted twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2006 and 2010, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in 2009, and was nominated for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2011 for Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan. Wikipedia  

✵ 30. December 1961  •  Other names - Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland photo
Douglas Coupland: 193 quotes7 likes

Douglas Coupland Quotes

“"Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh."
"That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Only damaged people want good things to happen to them through visualization. They want something for nothing.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with — however, they probably feel the same way about you.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Her friends have become who they've become by default. Their dreams are forgotten, or were never formulated to begin with.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“People like that woman make it clear just how asinine it is to believe that human beings have some kind of in-built universal sense of goodness. These days I think that everybody's just one spit away from being a mall bomber.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

“Meeting Anna-Louise was like finding a stranger's shopping list on the mall floor and realising there are other, more interesting diets than your own. It was the first time I ever felt incomplete.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“Your inability to achieve solitude makes you settle for substandard relationships.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

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

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.”

Douglas Coupland

Generation X (1991)

“We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.”

Douglas Coupland book Player One

Player One (2010)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“It turns out 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. I can’t imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 143

“I think about how I think I know a person then 'poof!' I discover I only knew a cartoon version. Suddenly there's this fleshy, demanding, noisy creature in front of me, unknowable and just as lost as I am, and equally unable to remember that every soul in the world is hurting, not just themselves.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“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.””

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

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

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“I hear that God has a really bad haircut.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

“The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals -- things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty… that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

“Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.”

Douglas Coupland

Generation X (1991)

“At what point in our lives do we stop blurring? When do we become crisp individuals? What must we do in order to end these fuzzy identities - to clarify just who it is we really are?”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary. wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.
And then it’s another day.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Language is such a technology.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

“Clique Maintenance: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“Veal-Fattening Pen: Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry.”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“I tell you what: I give you all of my strength - I seal it inside a little green envelope and mail it to you with hope and peace and much much love. Take all you need and take it quickly.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

“There's nothing at the center of what we do.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“I don't want dainty little moments of insight …”

Douglas Coupland

Generation X (1991)

“We are at the vanguard of adolescent protraction.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

“I thought that intimacy with another soul was the closest I could ever come to leaving my body.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

“Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both."”

Douglas Coupland book Player One

Player One (2010)

“As he ages and sees more of the world, he’s realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Yesirree, life sure is good.
Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good.
But of course, in books, good is boring.
Good is a snoozer.
Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them.
But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“I was wondering what electrons are actually doing when they sit in your hard drive in an old laptop at the back of your closet. I mean, how does an electron sit still — is it like a cartoon M&M learning back in a folding beach chair? Is it like an angry little steel ball bearing hovering there, just waiting to go nuts on protons? What’s the mechanism that starts and stops the electron? Who’s its dungeon master?”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

“Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly sold out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days.”

Douglas Coupland

Definitions

“The heart of a man is like deep water.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

“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.”

Douglas Coupland

"Transience Is Now Permanence & the Fate of the Middle Classes (Doomed)" http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_3.html#coupland, in The Edge Annual Question — 2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html, January 2010