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
Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?
It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.
Later, I would learn that coincidences are the most planned things in the world. Later, I would learn that every single moment is a coincidence.
I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the corner. In the end I believe we never do convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.
Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.
And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world – or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.
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.
If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.
A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.
My mood has changed now. And the sun has gone behind the clouds. I'm in this mood I feel occasionally... this mood where there's a very good friend nearby who I should be phoning. If only I could reach that friend and talk, then everything would be just fine. The dilemma is, of course, I just don't know who that friend is. But in my heart I know my mood is merely me feeling disconnected from my true inner self.
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
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.
We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.
You know what the best thing is about the end of the day? Tomorrow, it starts all over again.