Quotes from Douglas Coupland

But if you accept dreams, you also have to accept nightmares, and I know nightmares are bad things. And if dreams are so special, why is it that no person or company has ever tried to make a drug that leads to better dreaming? Sleeping pills, yes, but dreaming pills? Have scientists even asked that question?

I wish I could say that success turns people into plastic dolls, but the truth is that I don't know any successful people

She was born sad," she said. "No, that's not fair. People shouldn't be born sad, because life will do that to them anyway.

Nobody ever mentions the good side of OxyContin: It makes you feel like Jesus fucking a horse.

Neal fished around in a bag, removed something and handed it to me. It was a forky thing, but with a round depression. "What the fuck is this?" "It's a spork.

Jesus, Neal, watching you eat with a spork is like seeing Helen Keller at a ladies' afternoon tea.

Exposing hypocrisy doesn't make you a moral person

Ethan and I drove around Silicon Valley today looking at various company parking lots to see whose workers are working on a Sunday. He says that's the surest way to tell which company to invest in. If the techies aren't grinding, the stock ain't climbing.

the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images.

Your Joan of Arcs and Supermans don't come around too often. Mostly, the world is made up of people like me, plodding along. It's what most people do - plod, plod, plod. While it kills me to come to grips with the fact that I'm like everyone else, that pain is outweighed by the comfort I get from being a member of the human race.

We threw chew toys to Misty, Mom's golden retriever that she bought two years ago secondhand. Misty was supposed to be a seeing-eye dog, but she failed her exam because she's too affectionate. It's a flaw we don't mind.

I felt like I was walking on an airport's rubber conveyor belt.

And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know.

Wow. Whoops. Sorry. ... I just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp.

But in that one little window of time, many lasting decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my mother's heart or my own - vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts.

After playing Halo 2 for 3 hours, I went out and mowed down a Red Cross blood bank, raped anything with a pulse, and trashed the local mall. Then I toasted the gods of destruction with a goblet of blood stolen from a Girl Guide's body.

Probably tastes like a pocket calculator garnished with dried herpes juice flakes.

But when you're caked in your own leavings, you don't really mind being hit with brutally hard jets of water.

There's something fun about Sharpies that's really hard to articulate.

At meetings you have to explain what you've accomplished, so naturally you fluff up your work a bit, like pillows on a couch.

How strange that all you have to do sometimes to meet somebody is walk up to their house and ring a doorbell, and magically they appear as if from nowhere.

You know how sometimes after an afternoon nap you wake up with the shakes or anxiety? That's what happened to me. I couldn't remember who I was or where I was or what time of year it was or anything. All I knew was that I was. I felt so wide open, so vulnerable, like a great big field that's just been harvested.

To bring order into this jangled sphere man must find its centre Marshall McLuhan

When hit with a genius idea, people tend to say, Well, if I sat down in a chair and really thought about it, I could have had that genius idea, too. But they didn't--and even if they'd wanted to, it could never have happened.