Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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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.
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Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.
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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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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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I'm usually writing about survival. I never planned it, but it runs through all my books.
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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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You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.
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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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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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The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.
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I wanted college to be a real American adventure for me.
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You read about these oyster-shucking contests: Somebody did 100 oysters in three minutes, three seconds. I'm lucky if I can open one in three minutes, three seconds.
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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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So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.
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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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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.'
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I'm interested in most everything.
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Salt is an unusual food product because it is almost universal - all human beings need salt, and most choose to eat more than is necessary.
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I think we are drawn to anti-heroes because that is what most of us are most of the time and it is good to see that we are heroic.
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I was a theatre major and started off as a playwright.
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Before refrigeration, most food was heavily salted. Many of these salted foods have persisted, such as sauerkraut, pickles, cured anchovies, cheese, salted butter, ham, corned beef, sausage, and bacon. We still eat these things because we like them. But they are no longer the mainstay of our diet.
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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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I started writing 'Cod' at a time when people were first beginning to take an interest in the problem of fisheries because the Grand Banks had closed.
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For some reason, some kids have a fear of food. Some adults do, too. The best cure for that is to try a lot of different kinds of things. The more you try, the more experiences you have.