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

Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?

There is nothing so actively alive as the dead.

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

Despair is the central part of the psychopathology. For the handmaiden of gossip is treachery.

The old gods will bring about vengeance not so much because they exist but because I once honored them.

Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?" Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet

I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.

I was in Germany when the wall came down.

Justin Trudeau is going to elect Kevin O'Leary. All he has to do is keep doing what he is doing.

Every year the State will be the dog that chases its own tail... engaging in a futile attempt to close a perpetual budget gap.