Top Highlights

• As a reporter, you live for those anecdotal mistakes. Mistakes are how you isolate hidden truths. But as a person, anecdotal mistakes define the experience of being misunderstood; anecdotal mistakes are used to make metaphors that explain the motives of a person who is sort of like you, but not really.
• Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
• The word coincidence exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.
• My thesis at the time (and to this day) was that the impossibility of time travel is a cornerstone of reality: We cannot move forward or backward through time, even if the principles of general relativity and time dilation suggest that this is possible.
• The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.