Douglas Coupland Quotes

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

~ Douglas Coupland

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.

~ Douglas Coupland

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.

~ Douglas Coupland

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.

~ Douglas Coupland

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.

~ Douglas Coupland

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.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.

~ Douglas Coupland

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

~ Douglas Coupland

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

~ Douglas Coupland

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful.

~ Douglas Coupland

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

~ Douglas Coupland

I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.

~ Douglas Coupland

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

~ Douglas Coupland

Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'

~ Douglas Coupland

I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.

~ Douglas Coupland

Technology favors horrible people.

~ Douglas Coupland

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

~ Douglas Coupland

Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

~ Douglas Coupland

When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.

~ Douglas Coupland

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.

~ Douglas Coupland

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

~ Douglas Coupland

If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.

~ Douglas Coupland

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.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

~ Douglas Coupland

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.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.

~ Douglas Coupland

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

~ Douglas Coupland

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.

~ Douglas Coupland