Quotes from Douglas Coupland

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.

Games I do find interesting for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing.

Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

By your thirties, you should be doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your life and just get on with it - which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave.

Canadian winters are long. Life is hard and so is ice.

Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.

...you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.

I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.

Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience.

The best part of my life is gone, and what remains is whizzing past so quickly I feel like I'm Krazy-Glue'ed onto a mechanical bull of a time machine.

You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.

If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.