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

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

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

Don’t complain. Be a good person in this wrong world and transform it.

....in Bosnia, mass rape was a policy of the war, systematically carried out, implicating neighbors, paramilitaries, soldiers.

Don’t invite envy to your house – you never know who will show up, ” she used to warn me.

You make yourself happy while talking to someone. You will cease to talk when you lose the desire to impress that person.

Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

I've got rid of a lot of cynicism and anger. I feel positive about my development, and I just want to carry on making music and building myself as a person.

Every creative act – in science, art, or religion – involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted beliefs.

The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness.

It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs.