“I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.”

Canadian visual artist and writer

Douglas Coupland is a Canadian visual artist and writer, known for his 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Trained first as a sculptor, he became widely known through fiction rather than through the visual arts. Generation X brought him international attention and helped popularize the terms Generation X and McJob. He later published many books, including novels, short story collections, and essay collections, and also wrote as a columnist and contributor for periodicals such as the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Guardian, and Wired.