Quotes from Douglas Coupland

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

SAFETY NET-ISM: The belief that there will always be a financial and emotional safety net to buffer life's hurts. Usually parents.

Purchased experiences don't count.

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.

Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.

When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it.

When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?

Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.

New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.

Give parents the tiniest of confidences and they'll use them as crowbars to jimmy you open and rearrange your life with no perspective.

Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'

I like doing radio because it's so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you're inside there heads, not only that, you're in there laying eggs.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career, and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice. Well, what can you do about it? Next.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.