Douglas Coupland Quotes

Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer (born 1961)

Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian fiction writer and cultural commentator. He is perhaps best known for the 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which popularized the terms "Generation X" and "McJob". Most of Coupland's work explores the harsher realities of life for this generation, including intense media saturation, a lack of religious values and economic instability.

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Alternative Names: Douglas Campbell Coupland

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Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media might do us all such tremendous favours when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much as the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address, May 8, 1994 [Source of the book's title]

Truly modern citizens are both charismatic and can only respond to other people with charisma. To survive, people need to become self-branding charisma robots. Yet, ironically, society mocks and punishes people who aspire to that state.

Brazilification: The widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.

You are paralyzed by the fact that cruelty is often amusing.

I have this feeling watching Jasmine - that as you grow older, it becomes harder to feel 100 percent happy; you learn all the things that can go wrong; you become superstitious about tempting fate, about bringing disaster upon your life by accidentally feeling too good one day.

I have this theory about smart people. If you're smart, you're either the only person in your family who's smart, or everybody in the family is smart. No in-between.
I considered this. "I think I come from the everybody's smart category. But they don't apply their smarts to… larger picture pursuits. That includes me."

Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.

Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.

Doug's Law: "You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both."

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don't put it in a list. Don't even say the words.

Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures... And I think back over my life and I realize that my own nature -the core me- essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?

I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.