Douglas Coupland

“I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird.”

“Gap clothing allows you to look like you're from nowhere and anywhere.”

“I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to.”

“The future and eternity are two entirely different things.”

“I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.”

“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.”

“Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.”

“Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.”

“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.”

“Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.”

“Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.”

“In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in sentences that end before finishing. We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone. We bump into others and feel bashful at recognizing souls so similar to ourselves.”

“You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.”

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

“If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.”

“You're smarter than TV. So what?”

“You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.”

“Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.”

“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.”

“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.”