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
The one thing about my life that's different from others is that I wake up for no one, and for some reason, that's just good for your creativity.
A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.
The thing about living in the 21st century is you can get to fortysomething and not have anyone major in your life die.
My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.
Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster.
And in your new lives you'll have to live entirely for that one sensation-that of imminent truth. And you're going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it-and you're never to stop asking questions about it twenty-four hours a day, the rest of your life.
Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.
Chronocanine Envy: Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward.
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.
I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.
If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?
The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be healing—a blanket—the comfort of a friend. Without at least some rain in any given day, or at least a cloud or two on the horizon, I feel overwhelmed by the information of sunlight and yearn for the vital, muffling gift of falling water.
It's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments.