“Off-camera lives are unverifiable.”

“I am a bad actor.""Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into.""I'm all idea today.""I definitely don't see it.""I'm playing the idea of death. Look closely," he said.”

“It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.”

“Crowds, Scott said. People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the non-achiever, the trudger, the nonagressor, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.”

“We seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming.”

“Everyone who does not live in Berlin lives in Brooklyn now.”

“The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.”