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.

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.

But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.

He's such a dragHe's not insaneIt's just that everybodyHas to feel his pain.

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

Don't say you love somebody and then change your mind ... Love isn't like picking what movie you want to watch.

There is kind of a fundamental conformity, which is a virtual requirement to enter into the media.

If we but give it time, a work of art 'can rap and knock and enter our souls' and re-align us - all our molecules - to make us whole again.

I do my work as an actor, but another part of my work goes to the piece as a whole. I can be fairly detached looking at my work and be brutal on myself.

The best birthdays of all are those that haven't arrived yet.

Let women paint their eyes with tints of chastity.