Mark Kurlansky Quotes

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

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.

In ‘A Chosen Few,’ I spent hours and hours listening to the pain of people of who had survived wondering why they survived and what their life means and what right do they have to survive.

Things that become important to economies become ritualized and become deified. Because I’m Jewish, I always thought it was interesting that in Judaism, salt seals a bargain, particularly the covenant with God. Some people, when they bless bread, they dip it in salt. Same thing exists in Islam.

Don’t forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.

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.

The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.

By modernizing the process of food preservation, Birdseye nationalized and then internationalized food distribution… facilitated urban living and helped to take people away from the farms… and greatly contributed to the development of industrial-scale agriculture.

Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.

As with wine, geography affects the flavor. Oysters are usually named for a locale.

People are always asking me what my favorite food is. I say, ‘Food that tells me where I am.’

Adults have pretty much made up their minds – they like you to the extent that you confirm what they already believe.

The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.

Religion is a big problem in Israel and the Arab world, but again, the problem isn’t religion but political leaders who want to use the religion.

I’m usually writing about survival. I never planned it, but it runs through all my books.

I grew up in a neighbourhood where there was a lot of fighting. It’s what boys did during school, during recess, after school. And I was a fairly large kid. So everyone wanted to see if they could take me on.

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.

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.

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.

There comes a time in every writer’s life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.

Food is the best way to teach history and geography and most everything else.

I’d done occasional short stories, but I don’t like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.

I’m interested in most everything.

Americans are so egocentric.

It’s harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.

Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.

I’m friends with Studs Terkel.

I get up very early and write a lot.

I think food is very important to how we live as people and as families.

The entire trendy foodie world – food writing, food television, celebrated restaurants – is all about food for the rich. But the most important food issue is how to feed the poor or the hardworking middle class.

In the course of my research, I’ve read a lot of incredibly bad books – mostly by academics. I’m puzzled as to just why their writing is so terrible. These are smart people, after all.

Fishing in sustainable ways means fewer fish, higher quality, better price at the market. That is a formula that is good for the environment and the fisherman but bad for the consumer.

I am of that ’60s generation, and for people of my age, that phrase ‘change the world’ has a real resonance.

I wanted college to be a real American adventure for me.

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.

Environmentalists aren’t nearly sensitive enough to the fact that they are messing around with struggling people and their livelihoods. They forget that the fishermen are the people with the most immediate vested interest in having a healthy sea.

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.

One of the things I am most proud of is refusing to serve in the military when drafted during the Vietnam War.

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.

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.

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but ‘read the book.’ I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.

Let’s face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel – Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

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.

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.

‘Cod’ was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.

I translated an Emile Zola book, ‘The Belly of Paris,’ because I didn’t find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.

What sets baseball apart from other sports is the array of skills that every player needs: the speed, the power, the agility.

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.

History shows that any attempt by government to interfere in the consumption of salt is always extremely unpopular.

When you’re in theater, you inevitably wind up working in restaurants. I made pastry.

Children ask questions much more than adults do, and you have to wonder if this is something we have that we lose.

I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don’t want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.

People motivated by fear do not act well.

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.