Douglas Coupland Quotes

I'm a country boy who hasn't really been exposed to city living, and it throws me.

I miss the noise in New York: the sound of taxis and that constant buzz the city has.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

I'm very obsessed with the energy of New York and the idea of the way people behave in the city versus the way they behave in a natural environment.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

City's just a jungle; more games to play Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away I was raised in the country, I been workin' in the town I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

...the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night.

Believe it or not, the sky is blue here in Glasgow. I absolutely love it here.

I go down the street thinking, 'Oh my God, I live in New York.' But then I think, 'Oh my God, I'm on Broadway!'

There's an energy in an urban core that you just don't get anywhere else.

Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of Purpose; everyone's got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn't mean it's and unfriendly place -- just busy and preoccupied. Personally, I love it. I'm a social creature but there are times and places you just don't want to do more than grunt at your fellow human being.

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.

I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.

As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning.

There is practically no sense that is not violated every time we return from the country or the sea to Paris or London or New York.

In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.