Douglas Coupland Quotes

Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers!

I like the present. I'm always interested in new ideas, and what's happening. I'm not nostalgic.

What's a bar bill but a surtax on reality?

Kids today do nothing. They're so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.

Time erases both the best and the worst of us.

It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels

I don't understand beauty.

I was sick of wanting money. I was sick of being without a goal.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

The Vienna Franks are a good example of urban white acid folk revivalism crossed with ska.

Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowly time passes yet how quickly my body ages. But I shouldn't allow myself to think like this. I have to remind myself that time only frightens me when I think of having to spend it alone. Sometimes I scare myself with how many of my thoughts revolve around making me feel better about sleeping alone in a room.

Figure our what it is you don't do very well, and then don't do it. I'm not beating myself up about doing everything perfectly. The litmus test I always use for myself is: "Okay, if you won 20 million tomorrow in the lottery would you still being doing the same thing you are doing now with your life, Dough? The answer is "yes". I'm always very conscious of that.

Good looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.

I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one person in the world who doesn’t do bad things. And that there is one person in the world who is able to fly.

Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created an order for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles, we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would be a cartoon, not a world.

If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

maybe memories are like karaoke-where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liiked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning- and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life.

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.

And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.

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.

There's nothing cute or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

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.

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?

It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly.

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

Purchased experiences don't count.

In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying perhaps too much. But there are these feelings inside me which need badly to escape, I guess. And this makes me feel relieved because one of my big concerns these past few years is that I've been losing my ability to feel things with the same intensity- the way I felt when I was younger. It's scary- to feel your emotions floating away and just not caring. I guess what's really scary is not caring about the loss.

The heart of a man is like deep water

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.

If you're not spending every waking moment of your day radically rethinking the nature of the world-if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order-then you're wasting your day.

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

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