Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland OC OBCis 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. A specific feature of Coupland's novels...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth30 December 1961
CountryCanada
When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.
I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.
Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.
CONSENSUS TERRORISM:The process that decides in- office attitudes and behavior.
Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food.
Shopping is Not Creating.
Knee-Jerk Irony: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course in everyday conversation.
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.
The universe hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, the universe says to itself, 'Oh I see, this person doesn't like opportunities' and stops giving them to you.
Chronotropic Drugs:Drugs engineered to affect one's sense of time. Chronodecelocotropic drugs have no short term effect but over time give one the impression that time feels longer. Chronoaccelocotropic drugs have the opposite effect.
In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.
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.
I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.