Doug Coupland

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

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

You can never become rich unless you like rich people.

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

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

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?

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

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

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

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

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?

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

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

Technology favors horrible people.

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

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

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

Life always kills you in the end, but first it prevents you from getting what you want.

I think the killers get far too much attention.

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

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

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

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

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

Tofu hot dogs are actually scarier than real hot dogs. It's like wanting the worst possible meat product without even the thrill of it actually being meat.

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

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.

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

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

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

Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

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

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

There's nothing cure or funny or lovable about being cheap. It's a total turn-off.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

Once you see someone lose it, you can never look at them the same way again.

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

If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.

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

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

People will always choose more money over more sex.

God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.

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

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

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.

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

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

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

Depression is when you have lots of love but no ones taking.

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

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

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

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.

Star Trek characters never go shopping.

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.

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness.

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.

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich.

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'

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.

When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon.

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.

I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.

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.

Purchased experiences don't count.

Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

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.

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.

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

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.

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

Quick. Name ten dead redheads.

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

I've got 911 on speed dial.

Florida isn't so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.

We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but instead because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.

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

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

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

In our heads we're all about 33 years old.

Gap clothing allows you to look like you're from nowhere and anywhere.

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.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.

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

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

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