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
In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time . . . and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much.
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.
Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be SMcQ23667bot@hotmail.com.
Everybody 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.
I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does.
I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.
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.
No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.
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.
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.