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
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.
Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.
Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.
Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.
The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.
The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.
When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead.
We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must.
What's a bar bill but a surtax on reality?
All systems have failed me. In five minutes I'll be fine again for a while, but right now the inside of my head feels like Niagara Falls without the noise, just this mist and churning and no real sense of where earth ends and heaven begins.
Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food.
It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user interface problem. Not their fault. They'll just wait for the next version to come out- something more "user friendly.
Sometimes you can't realize you're in a bad mood until another person enters your orbit.
Nobody cares about worthiness. People care about what is real inside of you.