Douglas Coupland

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.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career, and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice. Well, what can you do about it? Next.

Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time.

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.

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

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

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

Twinkies are more natural than most TV-interview shows.

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

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.

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.