Quotes from Douglas Coupland

When I started researching this book, I thought that the Internet was a metaphor for life; now I think life is a metaphor for the Internet. I'm not trying to be cute. Just as it is impossible to point to a single spark within the human brain that proves life, so it is impossible to disprove that the Internet is a living thing. It is massive. It never sleeps. And more and more, it's talking about us behind our backs.

This guy here on the screen— Coupland turned up his laptop to show me the JPEG of the Chinese guy in Tiananmen Square. Know what he's doing now? He's working out this co-sponsor deal with Verizon Wireless and Pizza Hut.

It's called 'designer prisoner-of-conscience labour.

The one appalling thing about electric cars is that one plugs them into already overtaxed municipal power grids. Try mentioning this to a politician or manufacturer who wants to ride the green wave and you will quickly find yourself escorted out of the room. Mention this twice and you'll magically find yourself on the No Fly List. Mention this three times and your cold lifeless body will be found in a clump of brambles off the nearest motorway.

O Signore, la tua notte è così grande e la nostra rete così piccola.

I cautiously parked in front of the craft store, went inside and found the glue gun, which, back home, would cost $12.99. There in Arizona it was $1.29, which is to say, it was basically free, and at that price they should have just gone out to the freeway and hurled glue guns at passing cars.

We lost handwriting and got Comic Sans in return. That's a very bad deal.

Yes, Unit. That's why we hired you for this series of shoots—you're a unit. You're good-looking but not too good-looking, and your face has the quality most essential for effective clip art: it's pretty much impossible to remember.

Mr. Gunt, Mr. Neal here is a street survivor. We at the airline are honoring the homeless this year, and it was our airline's privilege and delight to offer him the one remaining business-class seat as a token of our faith in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. With the full authority of the EU air-system code behind me, I order you back to 67E.

One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness.

People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now the same thing. The future and whatever happens to you after you die - it's all melted together. Death isn't the escape hatch the way it used to be.

People don't change. They decay. They adopt ridiculous beliefs to pretend they have control over a world that is utterly indifferent to them. But they don't change.

And that's the day I became an artist. Nobody blames an artist for noticing stuff.

Just imagine how it must feel to know that your family won't be going to heaven with you- I mean, truly believing that. We're ghosts to him. We might a well be dead.

Crawl to your God, you arrogant bastard. See if your God doesn't look at the slime trail you leave behind you and throw you to the buzzards. You heartless, sad little man. You don't even have a soul. You killed it years ago. I want you to die. You got that? I want you to die.

Sometimes I wonder if it is too late to feel the same things that other people seem to be feeling. Sometimes I want to go up to people and say to them, What is it you are feeling that I am not? Please—that's all I want to know.

Humanity actually seems to be split down the middle on the definition of luxury: those who want gilded leopard-shaped teapots and those who want to live in the white box their iPhone came in.

Substitute Malaysia or Mexico for the replicator, and make Palo Alto the Bridge, and bingo: RIGHT NOW = STAR TREK.

only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony—which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can't imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

win a game of Scrabble using only three vowels. He can also bring fresh air into an unventilated bathroom, and he can renovate castles and huts on small budgets using knick-knacks from thrift stores and some well-chosen latex paint colours.

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.

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.