“Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.”

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.