Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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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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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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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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'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.
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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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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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Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.
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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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I'm friends with Studs Terkel.
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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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You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.
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Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.
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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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There's a lot about the early history of salt that isn't known, including who first used it and when or how it was discovered that it preserved food. We were sort of handed, in history, this world where everyone knew about salt. And it's not clear exactly how that developed.
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Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.