The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.
— Douglas Coupland
The thing about the future is that it never feels the way we thought it would.
If I don't learn something new every year, I go crazy.
I miss my pre-Internet brain, but that doesn't help anything. We can only go forward.
The neighborhood I grew up in had this fence that surrounds the watershed. And if you go on the other side of that fence, there's nothing until the North Pole and down to Siberia. It's the absolute cutoff point between man and nature.
The thing about living in the 21st century is you can get to fortysomething and not have anyone major in your life die.
The Internet has destroyed irony in the world, or at least wounded it considerably. What are we to do about an invention whose end result is that starving people in China are looking up things on marthastewart.com?
Comedy is the difference between how you see a person and how they see themselves.
If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.
We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.
I'm a visual thinker. Research tells us that only 20 per cent of people think visually. So what about the other 80 per cent? Don't they think in pictures? I mean if you imagine washing and preparing potatoes you visualise the process, right?
Any passion to collect has some meaning behind it.
I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.
I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130.
In my mind, I've always checked out in 2037; that's always been my expiration date. I'll be 75.
Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.
Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.
You're smarter than TV. So what?
I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.
I think social and moral disengagement is repugnant.
Aliens didn't come down to Earth and give us technology. We invented it ourselves. Therefore it can never be alienating; it can only be an expression of our humanity.
I'm suspicious of places that look decorated. I can understand why people do it, but you see too many cushions or a piece of fabric hanging and it's, like, 'Ugh!' A good house with good art will always work, no matter what.
The one thing about my life that's different from others is that I wake up for no one, and for some reason, that's just good for your creativity.
There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.
I'm always looking for things that are so incredibly present that they become invisible.
If you have a great idea, you should be able to communicate it as well. It's like the sound of one hand clapping. You have a great idea but aren't able to express it - well, how great was the idea?
I tend to look for pathologies everywhere.
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
I always thought of words as art supplies.
Nobody likes being told who or what they are.
If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.
My house. It's kind of eccentric. It's two decades worth of accumulated personal projects. Yeah, it is pretty dense in my house.
I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep within us.
Given the infinite number of coincidences that could happen, very few ever actually do. The universe exists in a coincidence-hating state of anti-fluke.
When I look at my daily schedule, I feel like a trout flopping about on a dock, drowning in the air. Some people are ruthless with their schedules. Not me. I wing it.
Vancouver is the square root of negative one. Technically it shouldn't exist, but it does. I can't imagine living anywhere else.
Data transmission is no longer something scary you don't want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.
My Google existence is probably larger than a lot of people's.
I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
Self-delusion is one of the funniest things there is.
A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.
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.
I miss the silliness of the Nineties. What would society be like if 9/11 never happened? If that silliness was extended forever?
The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
I'm agoraphobic. I can't deal with crowds.
In Canada, we're happy to provide a safe haven for next-door neighbors in the middle of a marital dispute. And if anyone trips while crossing the border, we're happy to set their broken bones for free.
I think half the people who get married now have met online. If I think about all the people in my life who married - they met online, online, online. And it makes sense if you think about it, because you fill out this form of 35 things that really define you and - bam - look, you've got two people who match. It works.
People say if you're doing an art project, that's different from a book, but I honestly don't see it. I try and try, and I just don't.
If your life had lyrics, would they be any good?
