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
I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.
The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will.
You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.
Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
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.
Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.
There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.
For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.
I always thought of words as art supplies.
Those Catholics, they really nab you when you're young. They sear you. They sear you; they do.
To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.
I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.
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.
It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.