Quotes from Douglas Coupland

I was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.

CONSENSUS TERRORISM:The process that decides in- office attitudes and behavior.

Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.

If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.

I don't understand beauty.

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on the outside - pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.

I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living.

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.

Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.

I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.

Nobody likes being told who or what they are.

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food.

There's nothing cute or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.