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
Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time.
Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.
People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.
All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.
We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.
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.
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.
Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.
Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.
Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.
The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.
The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.
The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.