Quotes from Douglas Coupland

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant.

The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.

Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.

Soon it won't be the Internet any more, it'll just be like air, like somehow they'll integrate the Internet into the air. And God's name will have ended up being 'Google,' because that's the way it worked out. It could have worked out that God's name ended up being 'Yahoo,' of course, but they lost out.

My house. It's kind of eccentric. It's two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.

As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.

Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.

With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies.

If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.

I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.

I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.

There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.

Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

You're smarter than TV. So what?

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness.

I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.

Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

I like having a beard. My beard changes my face shape and allows me to see in it family members who I love and can't see otherwise.

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.