Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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Americans are so egocentric.
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I wrote a children's book because children have the most open minds. They are the people who really want to learn.
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The entire trendy foodie world - food writing, food television, celebrated restaurants - is all about food for the rich. But the most important food issue is how to feed the poor or the hardworking middle class.
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As a post-Holocaust kid, growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of Jewish refugees, I had got the idea there were no Jews left in Europe. But I found in my European wanderings that many of them had gone back and rebuilt their lives.
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What sets baseball apart from other sports is the array of skills that every player needs: the speed, the power, the agility.
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I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.
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Things that become important to economies become ritualized and become deified. Because I'm Jewish, I always thought it was interesting that in Judaism, salt seals a bargain, particularly the covenant with God. Some people, when they bless bread, they dip it in salt. Same thing exists in Islam.
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In the course of my research, I've read a lot of incredibly bad books - mostly by academics. I'm puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.
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Environmentalists aren't nearly sensitive enough to the fact that they are messing around with struggling people and their livelihoods. They forget that the fishermen are the people with the most immediate vested interest in having a healthy sea.
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I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.
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It's true that writing and pastry-making are similar, but when you work as a pastry chef, you can get a kind of mania that everything you see is related to pastries.
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People motivated by fear do not act well.
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I think I'm a bit like Ishmael in 'Moby Dick': a story teller and an observer in his own crisis.
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Adults have pretty much made up their minds - they like you to the extent that you confirm what they already believe.
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I'm an urban person.
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The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.
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Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.
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I don't do much research on the Internet.
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Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.
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I grew up in a neighbourhood where there was a lot of fighting. It's what boys did during school, during recess, after school. And I was a fairly large kid. So everyone wanted to see if they could take me on.
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Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.
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Without the music to shout over, few people bothered saying anything.' (Remarking on a power cut while in a bar in the Dominican Republic)
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When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.
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Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.