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 don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.
If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.
I can't switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I'm always so zonked that I can't appreciate it. It's like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road.
I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.
I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird.
I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.
I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.
If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
In my mind, I've always checked out in 2037; that's always been my expiration date. I'll be 75.
In 2008 we came perilously close to killing money, exposing in the process how out of date money's infrastructure has become.
I'm not a hoarder, I'm a collector: if you have something you like, every time you see it, you have a little happy hit.
The ideal is that someone comes in here and they can't make a direct attribution to any one person. They can't say, 'That's a Doug thing', or 'That's a Graham thing'. In a weird way, if that happens we've failed.
Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.