When I come to a new city is I combine: I say, well, it's like Barcelona and Edinburgh, though I can't imagine what that would be. But Toronto, the last few times I've been here, what always comes up is Chicago and West Berlin. It's a big, sprawling city beside a lake, of a certain age and a certain architectural complexity. But the high-end retail core looks more like West Germany than the Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street is like K-Damm. There's an excess of surface marble and bronze: it's Germanic and as pretentious as pretentious can be.

I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

The street finds its own uses for things.

Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.

The 'Net is a waste of time.