I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.

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.

Don’t equate effective living to being busy

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.

When people say, 'Nothing's coming to me,' they usually don't like what's coming to them.

For those of us who live in the shadow of this noisy monster, there aren't too many of us who are sorry to see it go.

Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view

Mitt Romney is running for president again. That will be attempt No. 3. Well, everybody needs a hobby. He's almost certainly running, and I'm almost certainly retiring, so I don't care.

A woman might as well propose: her husband will claim she did.

Deism is logically compatible with evolutionary theory for the simple reason that the theory says nothing about the origin of the universe or of the laws of nature.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.