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

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

I think the American university system still seems to be the best system in the world

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.

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

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.

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