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
Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.
What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.
I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -sproing!- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.
People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.
I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain to be alive for decades and not believe in or feel anything.
Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.
Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.
Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
Chronocanine Envy: Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward.
Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.
The best part of my life is gone, and what remains is whizzing past so quickly I feel like I'm Krazy-Glue'ed onto a mechanical bull of a time machine.
I say ‘Uhmm...’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head - spooling.