Douglas Coupland Quotes

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Douglas Coupland

Profession : Author

Birth : December 30, 1961

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.

Douglas Coupland

I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right?

Douglas Coupland

I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?

Douglas Coupland

I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.

Douglas Coupland

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.

Douglas Coupland

If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?

Douglas Coupland

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.

Douglas Coupland

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.

Douglas Coupland

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

Douglas Coupland

Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.

Douglas Coupland

Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.

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 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

The one thing about my life that's different from others is that I wake up for no one, and for some reason, that's just good for your creativity.

Douglas Coupland

The thing about living in the 21st century is you can get to fortysomething and not have anyone major in your life die.

Douglas Coupland

My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.

Douglas Coupland

I'm suspicious of places that look decorated. I can understand why people do it, but you see too many cushions or a piece of fabric hanging and it's, like, 'Ugh!' A good house with good art will always work, no matter what.

Douglas Coupland

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.

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

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