Top 60 Mark Kurlansky Quotes

Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.

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 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.

Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.

I have lost count of how many wars I have actively and largely ineffectively tried to stop.

The inventors we remember didn’t invent anything. They’re the people who took somebody else’s invention and made it commercially viable.

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

Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money.

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.

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.

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.

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

Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.

I’m an urban person.

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.

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.

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.

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

The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted.

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.

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.

Americans are so egocentric.

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 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.

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.

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

I’m friends with Studs Terkel.

I’m interested in most everything.

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.

I blurbed a nice book, not at all like my book ‘The Big Oyster,’ called ‘The Essential Oyster.’ I blurbed a pretty good book about meat called ‘Meathooked.’

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

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.

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.

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.

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.

Violence does not resolve. It always leads to more violence.

Everyone always gets a little irritated by imitators, but mostly I’m flattered. What if you never did anything anyone wanted to copy?

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

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

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

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.

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 think I’m a bit like Ishmael in ‘Moby Dick’: a story teller and an observer in his own crisis.

I wrote a children’s book because children have the most open minds. They are the people who really want to learn.

Europeans are far more anti-war than Americans. They’ve had more wars, and they really just don’t believe in it any more. But Americans do.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.

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.

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.

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

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.