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

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

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

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.

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.

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.

I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.