Quotes By Doug Coupland

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.

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

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

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

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

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

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

I think the killers get far too much attention.

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