A Pickpocket's Tale

• “It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention,” he said. “Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”

• “Grift sense is the closest thing to a sixth sense we have,” he told me. “It’s stepping outside yourself and seeing through the other person’s eyes, thinking through the other person’s mind, but it’s happening on a subconscious level.” He went on, “I can analyze how I do things, but the actual doing it—when the synapses just start firing—I can’t explain.”

- my favorite quotations from Adam Green's profile of Apollo Robbins, a gentleman pickpocket, available for free in its entirety