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
Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.
I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.
I am going to give you a piece of advice... advice I wish I'd been told in guidance class back in high school, in between the don't-do-acid and don't-drink-and-drive films. I wish our counselors had told us, 'When you grow older a dreadful, horrible sensation will come over you. It's called loneliness, and you think you know what it is now, but you don't. Here is the list of the symptoms, and don't worry—loneliness is the most universal sensation on the planet. Just remember one fact—loneliness will pass. You will survive and you will be a better human for it.
One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.
Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.
I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.
The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will.
You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.
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.
Soon it won't be the Internet any more, it'll just be like air, like somehow they'll integrate the Internet into the air. And God's name will have ended up being 'Google,' because that's the way it worked out. It could have worked out that God's name ended up being 'Yahoo,' of course, but they lost out.
Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.
If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?