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" Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living. "
Douglas Coupland
Living
Out
Drink
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" By your thirties, you should be doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your life and just get on with it - which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else. "
Douglas Coupland
Just
Me
Whatever
" The harder you try to become the opposite of your parents, the more quickly you become them. "
Douglas Coupland
Parents
Become
Your
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Class
Travel
Same
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Plan
Taught
Never
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Write
Your
Family
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Time
Decision
Space
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Time
Improvement
Hope
" It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations. "
Douglas Coupland
People
Care
Family
" If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us. "
Douglas Coupland
Down
Bury
Deep
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Stylish
Fashion
Brain
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
College
Sports
Smart
" I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away. "
Douglas Coupland
You
Time
Said
" I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there. "
Douglas Coupland
Small
Time
Moment
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Odd
Human
Alive
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Moment
Doing
You
" I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living. "
Douglas Coupland
Know
Idea
Admire
" Every single moment is a coincidence. "
Douglas Coupland
Coincidence
Single
Moment
" I get verklempt if I see a vintage TI-30 or TI-54 calculator. But I don't think I'd want to use one. "
Douglas Coupland
I See
Get
Want
" If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy. "
Douglas Coupland
Go
Learn
New
" Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke. "
Douglas Coupland
Happen
Few
Number
" Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it. "
Douglas Coupland
Out
Then
You
" I think the killers get far too much attention. "
Douglas Coupland
Attention
Too Much
Much
" Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain. "
Douglas Coupland
Brain
Away
Will
" Games I do find interesting for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing. "
Douglas Coupland
Listen
You
Good
" 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.' "
Douglas Coupland
Want
Patient
More
" I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever? "
Douglas Coupland
Society
Forever
Like
" Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time. "
Douglas Coupland
Face
Family
Me
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Strong
Brain
Day
" 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. "
Douglas Coupland
Place
Animal
Change
" Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house. "
Douglas Coupland
You
Data
House