I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.

To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.

There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.

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.

Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.

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.