I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.

Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.

I've also done things that put me in odd situations.

There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.

I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

Basketball has so much showboating you'd think it was invented by Jerome Kern.

Complacency is a continuous struggle that we all have to fight.

Trust is for lovers. In politics there are only converging interests.

I'm a damaged person, but I have hope and a will to not give up.

I think a lot of Jim Thorpe, the Olympian, and his accomplishments.

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we're in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality.

Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything.

Most of the time I like to start an album abroad, not at home, just to avoid the pressure, to not wake up and think, OK, its the first of recording this album. I like to avoid that.