Douglas Coupland

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

I don't deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know because it hurts.

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.

When you're young, you always feel that life hasn't yet begun—that "life" is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you're old and the scheduled life didn't arrive. You find yourself asking, 'Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

Here's my theory about meetings and life: the three things you can't fake are erections, competence and creativity.

All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.

Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.