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
Douglas Coupland quotes about
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.
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.
So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.
I build my life so that I don't wake up for anything. Ever. If you make me get up early to do something with you, I will hate you and resent you and figure out a way of never having to work with you ever again.
I find people who prejudge reality TV to be annoying. Art comes from anywhere. Culture can ooze out of any crack. Prejudging is the death of creativity.
It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly.
I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.
Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.
My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.
I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.
I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.