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
I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.
I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.
I always thought of words as art supplies.
Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.
Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.
Everyone wants to share what he or she has learned with someone who really cares.
The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
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.
My house. It's kind of eccentric. It's two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.
My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.
My father has never once asked me a question, any question. There's a freedom that came from that. It allowed me to create my own way of thinking.
Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.
Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.