Douglas Coupland

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

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.

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

Brain research tells us that only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony, which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value.

What exactly is it that humans do that is specifically human? There has to be something. How odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is really quite sure of what makes people people.

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.

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.

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

Writing is largely about time, while visual art is largely about space.

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.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.