Lily King Quotes

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.

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.

Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.

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

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.

When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.

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.

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.

I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.

I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.

I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.

You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

There is something about finding the balance to one's nature - perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people.

Surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.

He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.

Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart, ” she said finally.

You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

Go. Go to your beautiful dances, your beautiful ceremonies. And we will bury our dead.

You don't struggle with these questions?""No. But I've always thought my opinion was the right one. It's a small flaw I have.""An American flaw.

The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.