Douglas Coupland Quotes and Sayings

Douglas Coupland quotes on meta-Doug and other matters, in other words, a meta-meta-Doug page.

"Many of us now exist in a secondary fashion, a meta-fashion, thanks to the internet, and the second you is related to but isn't quite you."

"If I put my own name into Google or Yahoo, I will discover that a kind of meta-Doug exists. I exist in there, my name, but it's not me: it's a mix of truths, half-truths, nonsense, misunderstanding, rumour, misinterpretation. But ... meta-Doug is going to exist for a lot longer than the real one ... this other me is going to keep on going on the net, cut and pasted and repeated: in the future we will all exist there, in this flawed afterlife."

"Writing is... the only thing getting me through the days. If I didn't have it I'd go on glue... I'd implode and explode at the same time. It's a need. When it goes, it's not so much writer's block, it's more raison d'etre block; I can't much see the point of anything."

"We're getting away with it. We're having ideas, and getting money, and getting the nasty stuff, the toxic manufacturing, all done somewhere else, and by the time the poisoned air comes back across from China or wherever it's been dissipated by the ocean, been cleaned... We're getting away with something, and we know it."

'I don't play games myself. Never... They prepare you for nothing."

"There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony... People confuse it with sarcasm, but far from it. The way I would define irony is this: to have the ability to contain opposing ideas inside your head without going crazy."

Great free reads: Douglas Coupland in The Observer