Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.
— Douglas Coupland
Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.
Most time capsules, when they're unearthed, are really awful. There's nothing good in them.
It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'
Characters in a book are very much like personalities divvied up within a family. In the end, it all averages out to a sort of overall averageness.
I grew up with three brothers, so nearly everything I had was destroyed or made fun of.
I keep vampire hours, going to bed at 2 A.M. and waking up at about 10:30-11 A.M.
Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.
I grew up in airports and on air bases. I know what flying and airports can be. And most airports make me feel like we're about three per cent better than ants. Especially U.S. airports. They're zoos. All civility is gone.
We are a dreadful species indeed, and deserve whatever it is our techno-baubles do to us.
For many people, myself included, the end of the world is happening all the time! It is a form of criticality that paradoxically gives us hope for change and improvement.
If money is not maintained, it can collapse like a bridge along Interstate 5 and fixing it, even with determined politicians, will take ages, during which time God only knows how much human damage will occur.
Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.
Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.
The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.
I kind of wonder if creativity is all morphing into one big thing that's not even art, but something universal and bigger.
I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.
Twinkies are more natural than most TV-interview shows.
I don't know how anyone gets anything done in cities. How can you live somewhere like London or New York, when there are 81 things to do every night? Awful. Give me solitude and space any time.
I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.
Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.
I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.
Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.
I connect fashion to other peoples' elegance, but not my own. I don't think I've ever felt elegant. I've felt appropriate, but never elegant, and I wonder what that must be like. I like it when other people are elegant - I prefer it - but I can't do it myself. I honestly think it's some form of autistic disorder.
If you waste five minutes of time a day, over the course of a year that adds up to one full work day. Think of five wasted minutes as a slow-release holiday drug. Savour it.
The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.
The thing about the end of the world is that not just the West collapses, the whole world does.
As a form of escapism, yearning for the 20th century is understandable, but in practice it would be horrible - sort of like going on a holiday promising yourself you could go without the Internet, only to crumble and walk in a daze to the local Internet cafe to gorge on connectivity.
We really ought to give ourselves a collective pat on the back for doing as well as we have in a universe of constant media change and mutation.
Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.
The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
By your thirties, you should be doing whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with your life and just get on with it - which is what I suppose happened with me as much as to anyone else.
I'm a pretty good drawer. I have trouble painting because you literally have to wait for the paint to dry. I'm disciplined, but I'm not patient.
Everyone wants to share what he or she has learned with someone who really cares.
For whatever reason, I tend to get reporters who are maybe in the middle of intense therapy, and they turn what's supposed to be a professional interview into therapy for themselves.
Who wants to talk on the phone? If you want to talk to me, text me. Or if we must, let's meet in person.
TV didn't kill radio, it just added something new to the mix.
I think Americans are weirdly puritanistic about psychopharmaceuticals. There are millions of people out there who would otherwise be dead or rocking by themselves in a corner who now lead full and normal lives because of amazing and wonderful scientific advances.
Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.
Some people think fashion is frivolous but it's not... it's just that some ideas come and go quickly, and that's the nature of the language of fashion.
Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.
My life is neither a disaster nor supernatural, yet it is an unlikely event.
Cellphones have, if nothing else, turned TV crime writers into lazy sloths.
In 2008 we came perilously close to killing money, exposing in the process how out of date money's infrastructure has become.
No-tech tourism is a form of temporal eco-tourism in which one reads books or watches film and TV precisely because of the absence of 21st-century technologies.
It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.
North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
The whole point of Gen X was, and continues to be, a negation of being forced into Baby Boomerdom against one's will.
