If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

The point of literary criticism in anthropology is not to replace research, but to find out how it is that we are persuasive.

I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering but how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of others' agony something bearable, supportable- something as we say, sufferable.

If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed at home.

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code