Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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People in America think of it as a sad and downtrodden place, and I guess it could be, but it's not because that's not who Cubans are. In Cuba, you get a good story every day you go out walking. People are so funny.
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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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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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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 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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You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.
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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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I'm friends with Studs Terkel.
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Dominicans, Nicaraguans, and even the already highly skilled Cubans greatly improved their baseball skills when occupied by U.S. troops. The only acceptable resistance to a hated American presence was to try to beat them in baseball games.
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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 have an increasingly strong feeling that all of us, myself included, too many times make too many statements and don't ask enough questions.
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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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I wanted college to be a real American adventure for me.
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People are always asking me what my favorite food is. I say, 'Food that tells me where I am.'
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Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.
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People have a lot of strange relationships with food. There's a lot more going on there than just, 'Oh, these crullers remind me of my childhood.' We have a darker and more complex relationship to food.
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Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
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Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money.
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What people eat is not well documented. Food writers prefer to focus on fashionable, expensive restaurants whose creative dishes reflect little of what most people are eating.
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I am first and foremost a storyteller; I want to tell a good story, and I want it to mean something - something that I think is important.
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Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.
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Everyone always gets a little irritated by imitators, but mostly I'm flattered. What if you never did anything anyone wanted to copy?
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I have lost count of how many wars I have actively and largely ineffectively tried to stop.
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In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Socialist government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being 'soft on Basques.'