Top 539 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Coupland - Page 4

If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even with determined politicians, will take ages, during which time God only knows how much human damage will occur.

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.

The thing about living in the 21st century is you can get to fortysomething and not have anyone major in your life die.

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.

Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.

I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.

Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.

The one thing about my life that's different from others is that I wake up for no one, and for some reason, that's just good for your creativity.

I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.

Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.

The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.

I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.

My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.

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.

Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.

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

If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.

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.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

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.

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.

Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.

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?

If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?

Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.

I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right?

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.

I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant.

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.

For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.

The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.

I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.

North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.

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

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.

In 2008 we came perilously close to killing money, exposing in the process how out of date money's infrastructure has become.

Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.

I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.

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.

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.'

Twinkies are more natural than most TV-interview shows.

Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.

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.

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.

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.

Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.

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.

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.

Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.

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

We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us.

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.

The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.

Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.

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.

My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.

TV didn't kill radio, it just added something new to the mix.

The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.

I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.