Quotes from Douglas Coupland

We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.

No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?

Any passion to collect has some meaning behind it.

I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.

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.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.

Here's what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

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.

If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even with determined politicians, will take ages, during which time God only knows how much human damage will occur.

I'm agoraphobic. I can't deal with crowds.

Bespoke tailoring: yes! I found this one pair of pants - they're Canali - and brought them into a tailor and said, 'Clone these, dammit.' They just do all the right things. I've got eight pairs in different colors and I never have to think about pants again. The only look otherwise that suits me is, like, the Professor from 'Gilligan's Island.'

God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.