Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Culture is public, because meaning is

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is

Getting fired from work is not a tragedy

I want to become a Hollywood film star. I genuinely would love to be in some movies.

What's David's role? David looks good, that's what David does. David looks good, and I'm the funny one, that's what I hear constantly. But I keep telling him that looks fade.

I'll tell you what 20 years teaches you - is that if one thing doesn't last something else will come down the pipe and to go from that and to do these films now.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

As long as I have my health, I want to be reporting somewhere.

Color is the overpowering of black; white – the final victory over black.

Whatever the evolutionary basis of religion, the xenophobia it now generates is clearly maladaptive.

Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.

The way that we see things today does not have to be the way we saw them yesterday. This is because the situations, our relationships to them, ad we ourselves have changed in the interim.