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
My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there's no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I've met say the same thing.
I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.
If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.
I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no animal equivalent were smoking, body-building and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are.
It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
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.
I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.
Why are we even here [on earth], what's our human nature? It's precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.
I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it.
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.