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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
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City of Alexandria
Virginia
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Pretty
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More quotes by Tao Lin

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I don't feel a connection with younger people or with Generation X, or any generation, I feel. If I felt a connection with people my age I wouldn't have written six books about feeling depressed, alienated, lonely. If I did I would have many friends and feel connected with them and probably be a happy person who has a real job.
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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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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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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But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. It just went away after a while.
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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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.
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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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 don't feel good if I'm repeating myself.
Tao Lin
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One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.
Tao Lin
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Regarding drugs: just the existence of drugs seems troubling to me.
Tao Lin
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The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.
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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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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My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning.
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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It seems like I'm not [happy]. Because if you look at my tweets and what I think and say, it seems like I'm worried about what's going to happen.
Tao Lin
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I usually have Kafka biography in my bathroom. It's a book I can open at random and feel interested in immediately. It's really funny. With this book, since I'm opening it at random and immediately interested, I don't feel the need to read more than I want to read, in that there's not, like, a plot that leads me along. So I can stop whenever.
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