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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   quotes 7   likes

Douglas Coupland Quotes

“Is feeling nothing the inevitable result of believing in nothing? …I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

Feeling

“Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.' Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Sadness

“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life , Feeling , Game , Learning

“Preemptive boringness. Being one-dimensional is the most satisfying method of coping with out-of-control people - with any situation that's out of control … Don't let people know the ideas you love, the games you've played, the places you've visited in your mind. Keep your treasure to yourself.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Love , People , Game , Idea

“Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives? How hard can it be to change gears and say, "You know what? Instead of inventing and telling stories, I’m going to make my life a more interesting story."”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 177

Life , Change

“"Ethan, there has to be more to my life than this."
"Why can't you just be happy as a shallow cartoon glyph of a human like everybody else here?"”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life , Happiness

“I realized a capacity for not feeling lonely carried a very real price, which was the threat of feeling nothing at all.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

Feeling

“When you're young you always feel that life hasn't yet begun…But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive.”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

Life After God (1994)

Life , Feeling

“We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

Age , Time

“… after you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of Earth? … What moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet?”

Douglas Coupland

Generation X (1991)

Memory , Dead

“Grandpa, like most of the fun-loving gang who built the Plants, just wanted to die or have his brain turn to oatmeal before it becomes too apparent exactly what a nightmare he and his buddies have saddled their descendants with.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Love

“You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about yourself.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Life , Fate , Change , Waiting

“If you want to get close to somebody, you have to tell him or her something intimate about yourself. They'll tell you something intimate in return, and if you keep this going, maybe you'll end up in love.”

Douglas Coupland Hey Nostradamus!

Hey Nostradamus! (2003)

Love

“Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic — they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life , People , Effort

“I have this theory about smart people. If you’re smart, you’re either the only person in your family who’s smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

I considered this. “I think I come from the everybody’s smart category. But they don’t apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me.”
JPod (2006)

Personality , Family , People

“Is the hotel Marge? It has to be Marge. I want atmosphere.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Marge is Anna-Louise's word describing sad, 1950s-ish diner-type places where the waitresses are named Marge."
Shampoo Planet (1992)

“You're never too old to dance, Dad…and you're never too old to dream.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard you say. Were you saying that with irony or for real?"
JPod (2006)

Dreams , Dance

“Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

"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?"
JPod (2006)

“Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures… And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me”

Douglas Coupland book Life After God

essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.
Life After God (1994)

Life , Thinking , Nature

“I think about how I think I know a person then 'poof!”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

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.
Shampoo Planet (1992)

Personality , Thinking

“Hang on a second—you already have my old laptop. Why do you want my new drives so badly?”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

"Because my contract says I have to write a book, and it's much easier just to steal your life than to make something up."
JPod (2006)

“Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.”

Douglas Coupland
Forgetting , Nature