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
Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.
Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.
Money isn't money anymore. Time doesn't feel like time anymore. Your sense of community, it's evaporated, too, or it's turned into something you visit at 2 A.M. on a website.
I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store.
I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.
Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.
For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.
It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.
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.
I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.
I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.
The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.
I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.