Douglas Coupland
The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.
Star Trek characters never go shopping.
Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.
The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.
You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.
I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?
It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.
If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.
Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.
If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?
I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.
My house. It's kind of eccentric. It's two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.
In my mind, I've always checked out in 2037; that's always been my expiration date. I'll be 75.
I think half the people who get married now have met online. If I think about all the people in my life who married - they met online, online, online. And it makes sense if you think about it, because you fill out this form of 35 things that really define you and - bam - look, you've got two people who match. It works.
I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130.
In Canada, we're happy to provide a safe haven for next-door neighbors in the middle of a marital dispute. And if anyone trips while crossing the border, we're happy to set their broken bones for free.
Nobody likes being told who or what they are.
I'm agoraphobic. I can't deal with crowds.
I always thought of words as art supplies.
Any passion to collect has some meaning behind it.
The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right?
I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?
I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.
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.
If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.
I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.
My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?
In the future, IKEA will become an ever more spiritual sanctuary. In the future, your dream life will increasingly look like Google street view. Everyone will be feeling the same way as you, and there's some comfort to be found there.
I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.
Everyone wants to share what he or she has learned with someone who really cares.
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.
The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.
You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.
You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.
I think the killers get far too much attention.
If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.
We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.
Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.
The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.
There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.
You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.
In our heads we're all about 33 years old.