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
Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.
We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.
Our conversations are never easy, but as I-we-get older, we are finding that our conversations must bespoken. A need burns inside us to share with others what we are feeling Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic. It is as though the coolness that marked out youth is itself a type of retrovirus that can only leave you feeling empty. Full of holes.
Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.
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.
It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.
Everyone has a gripping stranger in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing white shoulders who stamps your book at the library - a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying, "Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida," you'd follow them.
Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.
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.
I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful.
I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.
I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?