Doug Coupland

“Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.”

“The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.”

“Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.”

“Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.”

“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.”

“The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top.”

“Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.”

“If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.”

“If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?”

“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.”

“If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.”

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

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

“Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.”

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

“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.”

“Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.”

“Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.”

“If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.”

“People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.”

“It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.”

“Everybody has basically the same family, it's just reconfigured slightly differently from one to the next.”

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

“You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog.”