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
Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.
I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right?
I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.
Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.
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.
Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.
The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.
The ideal is that someone comes in here and they can't make a direct attribution to any one person. They can't say, 'That's a Doug thing', or 'That's a Graham thing'. In a weird way, if that happens we've failed.
Your fear of change is too clearly visible in your eyes
Some people think fashion is frivolous but it's not... it's just that some ideas come and go quickly, and that's the nature of the language of fashion.
The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.