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

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.

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.

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

I became an art major, took every art class my school had to offer. In college, I majored in Advertising Art and Design.

You do not have to imagine things; reality gives you all you need.

I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can't not be what everyone says I am. But I don't feel like an icon.

I always thought the saddest feeling in life is when you're dancing in a really joyful way and then you hit your head on something.

I think God gave talent to different people in different areas.

One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.

Try to figure out who you really are and not who you want other people to think you are.

It takes us long to learn that prayer is more important than organization, more powerful than armies, more influential than wealth and mightier than all learning.

The Constitution favors no racial group - no political or social group.