Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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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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The Pilgrims were unified by their religious zeal, but they couldn't fish, they didn't know how to hunt, and they were bad at farming. In fact, they never had a good harvest until they learned to fish cod and plow the waste in the ground as fertilizer.
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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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'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.
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The inventors we remember didn't invent anything. They're the people who took somebody else's invention and made it commercially viable.
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Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.
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How you solve your problems are quite different. In non-fiction, you can always go back to the research, whereas in fiction, you have to go back to yourself - which is a little bit scary.
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The fact that, almost a century after refrigeration made salt-preserved foods irrelevant, we are still eating them demonstrates the affection we have for salt.
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I am of that '60s generation, and for people of my age, that phrase 'change the world' has a real resonance.
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I love seeing what people are eating. It's a great way of looking at what is similar and what is different about people. It's sociology and anthropology and history rolled into one.
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It's difficult when you travel around America to get local food; it used to be very easy. You went from town to town and were more in touch with things.
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The Negro League had some of the best players in history. Satchel Paige was probably one of the best pitchers in the history of baseball, and many believe catcher Josh Gibson was a better hitter than Babe Ruth.
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I'm friends with Studs Terkel.
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There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.
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Baseball players are not specialists; they all have to do it all. That is why I, and many aficionados, dislike the American League's practice of replacing the pitcher with a designated hitter. This creates two players who do not have to do it all.
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As with wine, geography affects the flavor. Oysters are usually named for a locale.
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Chroniclers of the role of paper in history are given to extravagant pronouncements: Architecture would not have been possible without paper. Without paper, there would have been no Renaissance. If there had been no paper, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. None of these statements is true.
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One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.
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When Ozzie Virgil became the first Dominican player in the majors, his nationality was barely noticed. What the press and fans talked about was his skin color. He was the first black player on the Detroit Tigers, and a great deal of attention was paid to him as someone who crossed the color line.
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Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.
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What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project, and they want to color statements by this image.
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I have written a considerable amount - both fiction and nonfiction - about the Caribbean. My love for this part of the world is centered on a deep admiration for its people - a people who are both tough and romantic, dreamers and cynics, people who face a thousand defeats and are never defeated.
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Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
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I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.