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" Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect. "

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

Douglas Coupland

Changes

History

Live

" Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness. "

" The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts. "

Douglas Coupland

New

Ability

" I'm agoraphobic. I can't deal with crowds. "

Douglas Coupland

Deal

Crowds

" 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. "

" I don't know if it's a very smart idea to admire the living. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. "

" Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships. "

" 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. "

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

" When Donald Duck traded his wings for arms, was he trading up or trading down? "

Douglas Coupland

Donald Duck

Duck

" Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right? "

" My own experience with being interviewed is mixed. I suppose they're a part of my job, and as I would like readers to connect with my books, I do them. I've also made many lifelong friends whom I first encountered as interviewers - as a writer, they're a terrific way to meet and add smart new people to one's life. "

" 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. "

" 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

" People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't. "

" Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities. "

" 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. "

Douglas Coupland

Music

Kind

" You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things. "

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

" The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them. "

" I've got 911 on speed dial. "