Douglas Coupland quote: "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."

I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buy...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish u...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, th...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest iron...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Heres my theory about meetings and life; the three things you cant fake are erections, competenc...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral a...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric mea...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history onl...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones wh...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more th...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a struc...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the so...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because nu...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters o...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down?
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setti...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

A ring is a halo on your finger.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future -...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the enviro...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Bespoke tailoring: yes! I found this one pair of pants - they're Canali - and brought them into ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get rig...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 202...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever fe...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may s...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports ma...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sound...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to cur...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keepi...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

In periods of rapid personal change, we pass through life as though we are spellcast. We speak in se...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

In Canada, we're happy to provide a safe haven for next-door neighbors in the middle of a marita...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air....
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think if human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not j...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

In the future, IKEA will become an ever more spiritual sanctuary. In the future, your dream life wil...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a differen...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to b...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I'm suspicious of places that look decorated. I can understand why people do it, but you see too...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing a...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, t...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom ag...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career, and I cheesed off people without e...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Everyone has a gripping stranger in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarr...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I ina...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Her hair was totally Indian Woolworth perfume clerk. You know - sweet but dumb - she'll marry her wa...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable c...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all prom...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

We went from being boring little Canada to a sexy country of sin overnight? We are not used to being...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Your fear of change is too clearly visible in your eyes
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral a...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable c...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Tell me you feel this fire
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You fear that if you lower your guard for even one second your whole world will disintegrate into ch...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Money is more than a massively consensual IOU note. It is a piece of infrastructure and is as artifi...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even wit...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- becaus...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine article...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-li...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forg...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

...most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're go...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 o...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The ideal is that someone comes in here and they can't make a direct attribution to any one person. ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

We really ought to give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a uni...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

People don't have dominion over Nature. it's gone beyond that. Human beings and the world are now th...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

By the age of twenty, you know you're not going to be a rock star. By twenty-five, you know you're n...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few li...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, bu...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

In the spirit of Ethan's neurosis, we made a drywall list of keyboard buttons we would like to see: ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

[...] and after those big strokes, what's to tell? We run out of things that make us individual very...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells wi...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I'd sooner have died than admit that the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collecti...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourse...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memor...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writin...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

With 'Worst. Person. Ever.' I knew where it started and where it had to end, but I threw Ray...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution o...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Quick. Name ten dead redheads.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that sil...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way h...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel we...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

As you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Eroticize intelligence.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you'r...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Every single moment is a coincidence.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

«…you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You’ve had bad intern...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarte...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 per...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the othe...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get ir...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Star Trek characters never go shopping.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to sud...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawl...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I'm an adult. Discipline me and I'll bury you alive. - Roger
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning.
Imagine ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonde...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

What else? I also believe that if someone comes up behind you on the freeway and flashes their light...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age - regardless of how they look on t...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

maybe memories are like karaoke-where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling a...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Actually, it's not the impertinence I'm punishing him for, it's that he let other people know what h...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

It’s amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

the universe is indeed a beautiful place. If you doubt me, go check for yourself.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I don't understand the human heart. Only pain makes it grow stronger. Only sorrow makes it kind. Con...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think this is an alarming trend, Bethany, this whole 'passionate' thing. I'm guessing it started a...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of giv...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I used the phrase 'a certain age.' What I mean by this is the age people are in their heads. It's us...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who are unable to connect with the p...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowl...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

For there was once a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And s...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn’t ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

You like all animals at that moment, although no doubt you will one day choose your favorites. Your ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Society indeed conspires to keep you ball and chained.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Yet how often is it that we are rescued by a stranger, if ever at all? And how is it that our lives ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chanc...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of th...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I thought it would be such a sick joke to have to remain to be alive for decades and not believe in ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I am a quiet man. I tend to think things through and try not to say too much. But here I am, saying ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I have always liked the idea of Superman because I have always liked the idea that there is one pers...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Time, Baby - so much, so much time left until the end of my life - sometimes I go crazy at how slowl...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Our conversations are never easy, but as I-we-get older, we are finding that our conversations must ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Beyond a certain age, sincerity ceases to feel pornographic.
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn't happen to me so often after...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

She says to me, but were we ever intimate? How intimate were we really? Sure, there were the ordinar...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I thought about how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quit...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept wh...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

We are changed souls; we don't look at things the same way anymore. For there was a time when we exp...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is somethi...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

The richness of the rain made me feel safe and protected; I have always considered the rain to be he...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chanc...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Is that all time is - our perception of how quickly it does or does not pass?
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Chronocanine Envy:
Sadness experienced when one realized that, unlike one's dog, one cannot liv...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? ...
DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same bo...
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.

Copied!

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.

Douglas Coupland

Share:

Related

More Douglas Coupland