Doug Coupland's Quotes

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

Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters.

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

Lottery tickets are a surtax on desperation.

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

Technology favors horrible people.

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

A ring is a halo on your finger.

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

Gap clothing allows you to look like you're from nowhere and anywhere.

God is what keeps us together after the love is gone.

I want pills called September 10. You take one and your mind feels like the 11th never happened.

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

If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.

It's difficult to speak with beautiful people. No matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.

Nature is one great big wood-chipper. Sooner or later, everything shoots out the other end in a spray of blood, bones and hair.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

People will always choose more money over more sex.

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

Telling people they look relaxed makes them look relaxed.

There's a lot to be said for having a small manageable dream.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

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

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

Americans are a quarter of a billion people who have almost nothing in common except for the fact they've been told they have lots in common.

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

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

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

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.

Fate is for losers.

Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it.

Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without.

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

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

I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.

I have trouble with seafood because it tastes like a dock.

I know it's not cat food, but what exactly is it that they put inside of tinned ravioli?

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

I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and rename three o'clock 'Pepsi.'

I think the killers get far too much attention.

I've got 911 on speed dial.

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 nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?

In our heads we're all about 33 years old.

Is there anything in the world more annoyingly creepy than an unspoken dress code?

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

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

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

Most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting moments in our lives; the rest is filler.

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

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

Purchased experiences don't count.

Quick. Name ten dead redheads.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

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.

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

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

Star Trek characters never go shopping.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

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.

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.

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

We're rapidly approaching a world comprised entirely of jail and shopping.

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

You can only fall in love six times in your life. Choose wisely.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.

Your brain forms roughly 10,000 new cells every day, but unless they hook up to preexisting cells with strong memories, they die. Serves them right.