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
It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
It was like those stories you read of small villages where dinner was on the table and everyone just vanished.
The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?
Everyone has a gripping stranger in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing white shoulders who stamps your book at the library - a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying, "Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida," you'd follow them.
Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.
My own experience with being interviewed is mixed. I suppose they're a part of my job, and as I would like readers to connect with my books, I do them. I've also made many lifelong friends whom I first encountered as interviewers - as a writer, they're a terrific way to meet and add smart new people to one's life.
I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.
We really ought to give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a universe of constant media change and mutation.
I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant.
I've never really seen too much difference between writing or making visual art or designing furniture or clothing. It's still my brain - I'm just using different parts of it for different things.
I'm suspicious of places that look decorated. I can understand why people do it, but you see too many cushions or a piece of fabric hanging and it's, like, 'Ugh!' A good house with good art will always work, no matter what.
The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.
I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130.
It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.