Top 539 Quotes & Sayings by Douglas Coupland - Page 5

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.

Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time.

My own experience with being interviewed is mixed. I suppose they're a part of my job, and as I would like readers to connect with my books, I do them. I've also made many lifelong friends whom I first encountered as interviewers - as a writer, they're a terrific way to meet and add smart new people to one's life.

Games I do find interesting for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing.

It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.

I can't switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I'm always so zonked that I can't appreciate it. It's like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road.

Bespoke tailoring: yes! I found this one pair of pants - they're Canali - and brought them into a tailor and said, 'Clone these, dammit.' They just do all the right things. I've got eight pairs in different colors and I never have to think about pants again. The only look otherwise that suits me is, like, the Professor from 'Gilligan's Island.'

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

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.

Money is more than a massively consensual IOU note. It is a piece of infrastructure and is as artificial as Interstate 5, NutraSweet or season three of 'Mad Men.'

You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.

With 'Worst. Person. Ever.' I knew where it started and where it had to end, but I threw Raymond as many curveballs as I could along the way. He's like the coyote in the 'Road Runner' cartoons.

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.

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.

I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.

Everyone wants to share what he or she has learned with someone who really cares.

I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.

The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.

I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.

I miss the reference section at the library. I used to go there twice a week on missions. Now everywhere's a research library and I can't get an elitist kick from it any more.

My father has never once asked me a question, any question. There's a freedom that came from that. It allowed me to create my own way of thinking.

I've never really seen too much difference between writing or making visual art or designing furniture or clothing. It's still my brain - I'm just using different parts of it for different things.

Money isn't money anymore. Time doesn't feel like time anymore. Your sense of community, it's evaporated, too, or it's turned into something you visit at 2 A.M. on a website.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to.

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

My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'

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

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.

I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.

I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do.

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.

Those Catholics, they really nab you when you're young. They sear you. They sear you; they do.

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.

I've never gone on Facebook or MySpace.

I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.

Soon it won't be the Internet any more, it'll just be like air, like somehow they'll integrate the Internet into the air. And God's name will have ended up being 'Google,' because that's the way it worked out. It could have worked out that God's name ended up being 'Yahoo,' of course, but they lost out.

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

I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging. I think as long as you keep your mind in the palce where you're actively looking for patterns, you may not be safe, but you're going to feel safe, I think.

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 one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet? What's your takeaway? 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.

As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong, you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad lasts for very very long.

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?

You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again.

It's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.

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.

So where do you start when you want to start your life again?

There are three things we cry for in life: things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

When you grow up these days, you're told you're going to have four or five different careers during your lifetime. But what they don't tell you is that you're also going to be four or five different people along the way.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth - it's about the redistribution of time.