The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.

I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

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

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

A scholar can hardly be better employed than in destroying a fear.

It may be in the cultural particularities of people — in their oddities — that some of the most instructive revelations of what it is to be generically human are to be found.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.