Douglas Coupland People Quotations

It'd be preposterous for me to propose a universal cure to loneliness but I will say that people who do the things they find interesting, either creatively or vocationally, tend to become unlonely very quickly.

In the old days people had far fewer channels in which to place their imaginative time. There's definitely more competition for time . . . and yet people seem to be reading [books] as much.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

People will always choose more money over more sex

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

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

You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They’re an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.

I think of how people can betray me simply by not caring enough to hide the fact of how little they care.I think of how the person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

It's starts out young- you try not be different just to survive- you try to be just like everyone else- anonymity becomes reflexive- and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people- the others- the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out.

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

Technology favors horrible people.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother-they hug where I live now.'

When you grow up these days, you're told you're going to have four or five different careers during your lifetime. But what they don't tell you is that you're also going to be four or five different people along the way.

I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they'll borrow your heart and they'll forget to return it to you.

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one.

Most people can't handle a structureless life.

Nobody believes the identities we've made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people had true cores once, but tucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.

It's weird when people start sentences with 'frankly' - as if their other sentences don't count.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

I like doing radio because it's so intimate. The moment people hear your voice, you're inside there heads, not only that, you're in there laying eggs.

It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

I cry because the future has once again found its sparkle and has grown a million times larger. And I cry because I am ashamed of how badly I have treated the people I love–of how badly I behaved during my own personal Dark Ages–back before I had a future and someone who cared for me from above. It is like today the sky opened up and only now am I allowed to enter

I curled myself into a ball and cried quietly, doing that thing that only young people can do, namely, feeling sorry for myself. Once you're past thirty you lose that ability; instead of feeling sorry for yourself you turn bitter.

Books turn people into isolated individuals, and once that's happened, the road only grows rockier. Books wire you to want to be Steve McQueen, but the world wants you to be [email protected].

Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior - greed and stupidity and anger - and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human...I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds - of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

Here's what I think: the five most unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal.

What if God exists except it turns out he doesn't really like people very much?

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

People who advocate simplicity have money in the bank; the money came first, not the simplicity.

Post-adolescent Expert Syndrome The tendency of young people around the age of eighteen, males especially, to become altruistic experts on everything, a state of mind required by nature to ensure warriors who are willing to die with pleasure on the battlefield. Also the reason why religions recruit kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers almost exclusively from the 18-21 range. "Kyle, I never would have guessed that when you were up in your bedroom playing World of Warcraft all through your teens, you were, in fact, becoming an expert on the films of Jean-Luc Godard.

And then sometimes I think the people to feel saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder – people who closed the doors that leads us into the secret world – or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness.

You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

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

On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they're listening to what you're saying, you're off the screen.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.

I think as a species we're not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future - if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they've been given a huge boring chunk of homework that's too hard to do.

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.

I'm suspicious of places that look decorated. I can understand why people do it, but you see too many cushions or a piece of fabric hanging and it's, like, 'Ugh!' A good house with good art will always work, no matter what.

I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it.

I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130.

My own experience with being interviewed is mixed. I suppose they're a part of my job, and as I would like readers to connect with my books, I do them. I've also made many lifelong friends whom I first encountered as interviewers - as a writer, they're a terrific way to meet and add smart new people to one's life.

Some people think fashion is frivolous but it's not... it's just that some ideas come and go quickly, and that's the nature of the language of fashion.

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.

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.

I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.

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?

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

I think, there are people for whom freedom is a bigger, more important thing than stability.

It's just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change.

I think individual people are interesting, not really groups of people.

Nobody cares about worthiness. People care about what is real inside of you.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.

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 had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'

Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career, and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice. Well, what can you do about it? Next.