I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist

I'm an inveterate fox and not a hedgehog, so I always think you should try everything

Has feminism made us all more conscious? I think it has. Feminist critiques of anthropological masculine bias have been quite important, and they have increased my sensitivity to that kind of issue

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to a live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one

We don't know what we think until we see what we say.

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Culture is public, because meaning is

Most anthropologists are doing straightforward ethnography, and should

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things

You will never reach the stars without courage to lose sight of the ground.

«Per­ho­nen is not here any­more, » it says, with a voice made of wings and whis­pers.

Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say.

I really don't know what makes a comedian. I think it's a family background and environment. Yet if you put the same ingredients in another person, he may never utter a funny line.

Great marriages are like the Higgs Boson particle, its existence has been theorized, but no one has ever seen one.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse

Mankind in the gross is a gaping monster, that loves to be deceived and has seldom been disappointed.

In most fields of endeavor there are no easy jobs; there are only graceful ways of performing difficult ones.

Clearly it is not the lovelorn sufferer who seeks solace in chocolate, but rather the chocolate-deprived individual, who, desperate, seeks in mere love a pale approximation of bittersweet euphoria.

In social situations I still feel scared. My best friend and husband give me the freedom to be myself.