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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. "

Douglas Coupland

Think

Culture

Smiling

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" 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. "

" I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone. "

Douglas Coupland

Flying

Know

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

" People will always choose more money over more sex. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" It's fun to sentimentalize the 20th-century lifestyle and the 20th-century brain, but it helps nobody, it makes you look ancient, there's no going back, and you'd be miserable if you did. "

" I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant. "

" I've never really seen too much difference between writing or making visual art or designing furniture or clothing. It's still my brain - I'm just using different parts of it for different things. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable. "

Douglas Coupland

Society

Enough

" I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is. "

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

" You're smarter than TV. So what? "

Douglas Coupland

Smarter

Than

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

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

" 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. "

" I've never gone on Facebook or MySpace. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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