Douglas Coupland quotes:

Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives.

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.

The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.

There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.

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

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

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

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

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?

Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.

Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

I decided at 40 I was wasting entire chunks of my brain and didn't want to blow my one chance on Earth. I'm glad I made that decision. Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space. Sometimes, as with film, you can hybridize, but I think it's basically the space part of my brain wanting equal footing with the time part.

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

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

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

I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to.

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

Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.

I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.

Soon it won't be the Internet any more, it'll just be like air, like somehow they'll integrate the Internet into the air. And God's name will have ended up being 'Google,' because that's the way it worked out. It could have worked out that God's name ended up being 'Yahoo,' of course, but they lost out.

It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.

Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.

Only losers make decisions when things are bad. The time to rejig your life is the time when it's seemingly smooth.

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.

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

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.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.

I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.

Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.

As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.

I go to the gym three days a week. You have to or else - I don't want to be the guy that dies shoveling snow.

Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.

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

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

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.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

I can't switch time zones any more. London is one of my favourite places, but I'm always so zonked that I can't appreciate it. It's like a six-inch sheet of glass between me and Charing Cross Road.

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.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?

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

My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

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

With 'Worst. Person. Ever.' I knew where it started and where it had to end, but I threw Raymond as many curveballs as I could along the way. He's like the coyote in the 'Road Runner' cartoons.

I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store.

My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.

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.

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.

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

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.

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.

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

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

Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.

The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.

We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

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.

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 was at Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver for four years, and I loved it.

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.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do, and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

High school is such a shared experience in North American culture.

If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even with determined politicians, will take ages, during which time God only knows how much human damage will occur.

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

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.

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

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

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them.

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

Make your goals big and broad enough so that they never become answered prayers and boomerang to curse you.

Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.

Everyone wants to share what he or she has learned with someone who really cares.

We really ought to give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a universe of constant media change and mutation.

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

People will always choose more money over more sex.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

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?

I'm not patient - and I'm getting more impatient as I get older - but I am disciplined about writing, and I want that on my tombstone: 'He wasn't patient, but he was disciplined.'

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

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

There are three things we cry about in life, things that are lost, things that are found, and things that are magnificent.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.

I think the killers get far too much attention.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

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

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.

Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.

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

The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil.

Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.