Quotes from Douglas Coupland

We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.

I'm not a hoarder, I'm a collector: if you have something you like, every time you see it, you have a little happy hit.

Technology favors horrible people.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.

The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.

I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: 'He wasn't patient, but he was disciplined.'

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Chronocanine Envy:Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot live only in the present tense. As Kierkegaard said, "Life must be lived forward.

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.

The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?

I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.