Inspiration
After Shampoo Planet, Coupland began to look for a low tech topic for his next novel. He began to study the Irish potato famine of 1845–1847. While researching this, short stories “started popping out of ”. Coupland’s religious life as a child was non-existent. He was raised as a blank slate, with no religious influence from his parents. He didn’t celebrate religious holidays such as Christmas or Easter.
"For me there was nothing—not even the seed of a religious experience to grow from—and I found that I had to build (and continue to) try and build some sort of faith for myself using the components taken from disposable West Coast suburban culture. Malls and nature and fast-food places."
—Coupland, USA Today, 1994.
Life after God is one expression of this pursuit.
Read more about this topic: Life After God
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)