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.

— Douglas Coupland

When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing.

— Douglas Coupland

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old, and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scramble madness—all that time I had before?

— Douglas Coupland

When you think about Twitter and you think what a dumb stupid throwaway technology, and then you have the Iranian elections, and it actually saves the day - you can't prejudge technologies now because they have effects you may not have intended.

— Douglas Coupland

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

— Douglas Coupland

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

— Douglas Coupland

Worrying about money is one of the worst worries. It’s like having locked-in syndrome, except you’re still moving around and doing things. Your head burns. If other people are not having money problems, it pisses you off because it reminds you that you’re limited in the ways you can express your agency in the world, and they aren’t. Worrying about money is anger-inducing because it makes you think about time: how many dollars per hour, how much salary per year, how many years until retirement. Worrying about money forces you to do endless math in your head, and most people didn’t like math in high school, and they don’t like it now.

— Douglas Coupland

Wow. Whoops. Sorry. ... I just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp.

— Douglas Coupland

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

— Douglas Coupland

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

— Douglas Coupland