I’ve always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is. – Douglas Coupland
Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities. – Douglas Coupland
I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements. – Douglas Coupland
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? – Douglas Coupland
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. – Douglas Coupland
Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody’s talking about these 100-hour movies called ‘Breaking Bad’. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is ‘Breaking Bad.’ – Douglas Coupland
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. – Douglas Coupland
My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, ‘Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.’ And your parents are like: ‘O.K., I’ll quit my job. We’ll move to an Alpine community.’ – Douglas Coupland
People say if you’re doing an art project, that’s different from a book, but I honestly don’t see it. I try and try, and I just don’t. – Douglas Coupland
Data transmission is no longer something scary you don’t want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house. – Douglas Coupland
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. – Douglas Coupland
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. – Douglas Coupland
If you don’t have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can’t expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis. – Douglas Coupland
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. – Douglas Coupland
Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again. – Douglas Coupland
I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country. – Douglas Coupland
Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn’t exist, but it does. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. – Douglas Coupland
The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member. – Douglas Coupland
My father has never once asked me a question, any question. There’s a freedom that came from that. It allowed me to create my own way of thinking. – Douglas Coupland
If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even with determined politicians, will take ages, during which time God only knows how much human damage will occur. – Douglas Coupland
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. – Douglas Coupland
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they’re so rude. – Douglas Coupland
