Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.

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.

If you have the woman you love, what more do you need? Well, besides an alibi for the time of her husband’s murder.

Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.

Many people are not ready to pay for advice they can use, so the few that do, break boundaries and soar higher.

Eat good food, keep moving, and let your body take care of the rest.

Toots Shore's restaurant is so crowded nobody goes there anymore.

Great talent stands in line to join your team because the culture becomes the stuff of legend.

The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.

How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?

The best design teams are not people who are exactly the same...otherwise you're just sitting and telling, 'You're fabulous.' 'No, you're fabulous.'

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity