Mark Kurlansky Quotes
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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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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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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 usually writing about survival. I never planned it, but it runs through all my books.
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Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.
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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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Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.
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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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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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Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
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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 have lost count of how many wars I have actively and largely ineffectively tried to stop.
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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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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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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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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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Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money.
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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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Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
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I'm interested in most everything.
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My most memorable job was on a lobster boat. I was a pretty strong kid, and they just needed someone who could haul pots on 200 ft. of line.
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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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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.