Quotes from Douglas Coupland

TV didn't kill radio, it just added something new to the mix.

When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.

It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did.

I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.

When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.

I think half the people who get married now have met online. If I think about all the people in my life who married - they met online, online, online. And it makes sense if you think about it, because you fill out this form of 35 things that really define you and - bam - look, you've got two people who match. It works.

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don't know why, and if we do find out why, it's decades later and knowing why doesn't matter any more.

We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us.

I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do.

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

I've got 911 on speed dial.

I think the killers get far too much attention.

I've never gone on Facebook or MySpace.

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

There are few, if any, Canadian men that have never spelled their name in a snow bank.

I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.

The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will.

If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.

High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.