Douglas Coupland
Canadian fiction writer and cultural commentator.
Older staffers don’t even bother coming in on weekends. Where is the sleep-crazed, Pepsi-fuelled one-point-oh tech environment that can only be created by having no green vegetables, no sex and no life?
Cowboy said, “I miss the greed of the 1990s bubble.”
John Doe said, “I miss the possibility of unearned wealth.”
Bree said, “I miss the possibility of doing something Apple, something one-point-oh.”
Evil Mark said, “I miss people having Hot Wheels tracks set up in their cubicles.”
Gord-O walked into the pod. “You can’t miss the nineties, because you weren’t there. They were great. Too bad you screwed-up twits missed out on the party.”
"We call Jasmine's room 'The Harem,' a sexy place, about which Dan never complained, even though his own possessions, his laptop PC and briefcase, for example, looked crazy in the environment, invasive and overcomplex, like Stealth bombers in SmurfWorld."
What's the point of being efficient if you're only leading an efficiently blank life?
Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.
Yesirree, life sure is good.
Yesirree, nothing could possibly go wrong with everything being so good.
But of course, in books, good is boring.
Good is a snoozer.
Good makes people close the covers and never reopen them.
But you know—you'd think that just once when life finally started going my way, that cosmic writer out there would allow me and all of my co-characters to simply enjoy things for just a little while. I mean, what kind of a prick would end a book just when everything's going so well?
We have to count. I want to be part of history. I want a Wikipedia page. I want Google hits. I don’t want to be just a living organism that comes and goes and leaves no trace on this planet.
Boomer Envy: Envy of material wealth and long-range material security accrued by older members of the baby boom generation by virtue of fortunate births.
If you can control your emotions, chances are you don’t have too many.
Your refusal to acknowledge the dark side of humanity makes you prey to that dark side.
Here’s my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can’t fake are erections, competence and creativity. That’s why meetings become toxic — they put uncreative people in a situation in which they have to be something they can never be. And the more effort they put into concealing their inabilities, the more toxic the meeting becomes.
If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.
“Why are we drinking Zima? It’s beyond irony. It’s not funny or anything. It’s just gross. Why not just serve us jugs of Hitler’s piss instead?”
“Drinking Zima is something Douglas Coupland would make a character do.”
“To what end?”
“It’d be a device that would allow him to locate the characters in time and a specific sort of culture.”
Technology does not always equal progress.
Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers.
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.
Nobody has ever been happy in a job they obtained by first handing in a resumé.
Finally, my life was a story. My days would no longer feel like a video game that resets to zero every time I wake up, and then begs for coins.
Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permenant residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent flyer programs at parties.
Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village -- locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back -- so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.”
I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface.