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I don't know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I've read maybe one page of one of his books and didn't think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.

Tao Lin

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Tao Lin
Age: 41
Born: 1983
Born: July 2
Novelist
Poet
Writer
City of Alexandria
Virginia
Think
Books
Douglas
Thinking
Anyone
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More quotes by Tao Lin

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I actually don't have...opinions. I'm not being secretive about anything. I just actually don't have opinions about society. I can discern that certain things have an effect on certain other things but I don't view those effects as good or bad.
Tao Lin
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On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.
Tao Lin
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loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shape of a helicopter the same size as the helicopter and that's it's only skill and it isn't good enough but it's still amazing.
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We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.
Tao Lin
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Regarding drugs: just the existence of drugs seems troubling to me.
Tao Lin
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Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong and probably it was true—life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.
Tao Lin
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I cried when my ex-girlfriend sent me a text message saying how much she liked my present to her.
Tao Lin
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Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn't be moose there and the moose would fall.
Tao Lin
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I think mostly the commodifying comes after I've done something that has some other value to me.
Tao Lin
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If I focused hard on getting a literary agent, and doing things like that, instead of designing my blog's header, I would have more money, I think. I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view [anything] as part of being a person, so I feel okay with marketing or other things like that.
Tao Lin
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I like reading books where people with a lot of money use it to do whatever they want. Like stay in expensive hotels and do whatever drugs they want and fly wherever they want.
Tao Lin
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While other rich people might be like, Once I'm rich I'm going to go on a vacation to wherever, but instead they just keep wanting to be more rich. It just seems like it would be fun to do whatever you wanted. If I were really rich I would be flying places, I think.
Tao Lin
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I just keep investing in the future, and I haven't reached the point where I'm not doing that.
Tao Lin
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You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.
Tao Lin
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I think Gmail chats are different than IRL conversations because Gmail chats are saved by Gmail exactly as they occurred. I like texts and emails. Seems like I don't have anything to say that isn't obvious about texts, emails, and Gmail chats.
Tao Lin
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If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.
Tao Lin
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It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else–pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.
Tao Lin
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I think everyone is racist, to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
Tao Lin
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Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon.
Tao Lin
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But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. It just went away after a while.
Tao Lin