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

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

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

Younger anthropologists have the notion that anthropology is too diverse. The number of things done under the name of anthropology is just infinite; you can do anything and call it anthropology

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

Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.

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.