Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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Montserrat is a very pleasant place to do nothing. The islanders know this, and they know this is why tourists go there, but they are not totally comfortable with the notion.
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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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Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.
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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 don't do much research on the Internet.
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Europeans are far more anti-war than Americans. They've had more wars, and they really just don't believe in it any more. But Americans do.
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I'm an urban person.
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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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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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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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Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.
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Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.
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People motivated by fear do not act well.
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The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.
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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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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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'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.