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.
— Mark Kurlansky
Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.
Food is interesting to me because it's a way of understanding culture and societies and history. I would never write about food just as food. Just like I would never write about baseball just as baseball.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that Judaism has been, throughout its history since A.D. 70, a diaspora culture that's all about being a minority. In fact, being a small minority. When I'm in Israel, I cannot get used to the notion that we're all Jewish. It doesn't seem to me that we're supposed to all be Jewish.
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.
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.
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.
I think I'm a bit like Ishmael in 'Moby Dick': a story teller and an observer in his own crisis.
I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.
Commercial fishing is always so behind the curve of technology that they were building ships with wooden hulls and masts in the 1940s, though it also had a diesel engine, which probably was used most of the time.
Food is the best way to teach history and geography and most everything else.
Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.
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.
Children ask questions much more than adults do, and you have to wonder if this is something we have that we lose.
Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.
So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.
Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.
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.
History shows that any attempt by government to interfere in the consumption of salt is always extremely unpopular.
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.
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.
People motivated by fear do not act well.
What sets baseball apart from other sports is the array of skills that every player needs: the speed, the power, the agility.
I have lost count of how many wars I have actively and largely ineffectively tried to stop.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Americans are so egocentric.
Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.
'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.
The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.
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.
I get up very early and write a lot.
I think food is very important to how we live as people and as families.
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.
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.
I would like to know what politicians eat on the campaign trail, what Picasso ate in his pink period, what Walt Whitman ate while writing the verse that defined America, what mid-westerners bring to potlucks, what is served at company banquets, what is in a Sunday dinner these days, and what workers bring for lunch.
Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.
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.
One of the things I am most proud of is refusing to serve in the military when drafted during the Vietnam War.
As a post-Holocaust kid, growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of Jewish refugees, I had got the idea there were no Jews left in Europe. But I found in my European wanderings that many of them had gone back and rebuilt their lives.
The impact of the Vietnam War on TV made everyone recognize the importance of visual media.
I have this whole section in my oyster book where I talk about how New Yorkers have gotten divorced from the sea and completely forget that they live by the sea, and I suggest that this happened when they lost their oysters.
I'm an urban person.
You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.
