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" I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living. "
Douglas Coupland
Know
Idea
Admire
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" 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. "
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" God is what keeps us together after the love is gone. "
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" If your life had lyrics, would they be any good? "
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" 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. "
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" Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper. "
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" High school is such a shared experience in North American culture. "
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" 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. "
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" I think way back, the '20s or the '30s, when Kodak came out with the Brownie and they put a list of instructions on the box, like how to use this thing, I think someone arbitrarily said, 'Make sure the person in the photograph is smiling.' And we went from that one sort of set of industrial instructions to this whole culture of perkiness. "
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" For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves. "
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" Quick. Name ten dead redheads. "
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" The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal. "
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" 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? "
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" I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient. "
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" If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween. "
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" Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness. "
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" The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli? "
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" I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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? "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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