Douglas Coupland

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.

Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.

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

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.

My father has never once asked me a question, any question. There's a freedom that came from that. It allowed me to create my own way of thinking.

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

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.

The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.

If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.

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.

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

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?

You can have information or you can have a life, but you can't have both.

You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you worry you are an interchangeable cog.

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

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

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.

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

Anyway, I want to remember that love can happen. Because there is life after not having a life. I never expected love to happen. What was I expecting from life, then?

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.

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