The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable.

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

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

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance

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

I think the perception of there being a deep gulf between science and the humanities is false