Top 350 Douglas Coupland Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.”

— Douglas Coupland

52. “You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn’t care. I guess that’s what’s scariest: not caring about the loss.”

— Douglas Coupland

53. “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.”

— Douglas Coupland

54. “Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.”

— Douglas Coupland

55. “Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.”

— Douglas Coupland

56. “Eroticize intelligence.”

— Douglas Coupland

57. “Nobody believes the identities we’ve made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now – as though people had true cores once, but tucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow.”

— Douglas Coupland

58. “I’ve got 911 on speed dial.”

— Douglas Coupland

59. “My writing process is ritualized and monotonous, but there’s no other way to get the job done. All other fiction writers I’ve met say the same thing.”

— Douglas Coupland

60. “New York is a theme park for people with IQs over 108.”

— Douglas Coupland

61. “Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that’s sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.”

— Douglas Coupland

62. “I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I’ve realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.”

— Douglas Coupland

63. “You can never become rich unless you like rich people.”

— Douglas Coupland

64. “What if God exists except it turns out he doesn’t really like people very much?”

— Douglas Coupland

65. “On TV people look at your hair and then they look at your skin, and then they look at your clothes, and by the time they’re listening to what you’re saying, you’re off the screen.”

— Douglas Coupland

66. “We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place.”

— Douglas Coupland

67. “Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.”

— Douglas Coupland

68. “Sometimes I think God is like weather – you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do wit you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it.”

— Douglas Coupland

69. “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

70. “Technology favors horrible people.”

— Douglas Coupland

71. “Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We’re human; we’re amnesia machines.”

— Douglas Coupland

72. “God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.”

— Douglas Coupland

73. “Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.”

— Douglas Coupland

74. “Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they’re still getting real food.”

— Douglas Coupland

75. “The future and eternity are two entirely different things.”

— Douglas Coupland

76. “Forget about being world famous, it’s hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.”

— Douglas Coupland

77. “All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.”

— Douglas Coupland

78. “Long lives aren’t natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.”

— Douglas Coupland

79. “Too much free time is certainly a monkey’s paw in disguise. Most people can’t handle a structureless life.”

— Douglas Coupland

80. “Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?”

— Douglas Coupland

81. “There’s nothing cute or funny or lovable about being cheap. It’s a total turn-off.”

— Douglas Coupland

82. “Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.”

— Douglas Coupland

83. “You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?”

— Douglas Coupland

84. “In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other’s sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week.”

— Douglas Coupland

85. “All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family – it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.”

— Douglas Coupland

86. “It is indeed a mistake to confuse children with angels.”

— Douglas Coupland

87. “You can have information or you can have a life, but you can’t have both.”

— Douglas Coupland

88. “At least there’s nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn’t see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don’t know just make me want to say YIKES! I’ll take history over mystery any day of the week.”

— Douglas Coupland

89. “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.”

— Douglas Coupland

90. “If you don’t change, then what’s the point of anything happening to you? It’ll still be happening to an unchanged person.”

— Douglas Coupland

91. “I don’t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.”

— Douglas Coupland

92. “Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.”

— Douglas Coupland

93. “Purchased experiences don’t count.”

— Douglas Coupland

94. “I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with 3 bowls of Cap’n Crunch – had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day.”

— Douglas Coupland

95. “If you’re not a tree hugger, then you’re a what, a tree hater?”

— Douglas Coupland

96. “Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes.”

— Douglas Coupland

97. “Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.”

— Douglas Coupland

98. “Hasn’t it been a long time since you had a flying dream?”

— Douglas Coupland

99. “It’s weird when people start sentences with ‘frankly’ – as if their other sentences don’t count.”

— Douglas Coupland

100. “Dreams don’t come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.”

— Douglas Coupland