I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.

Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.

Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.

Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.

When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.