Mark Kurlansky Quotes

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

Chroniclers of the role of paper in history are given to extravagant pronouncements: Architecture would not have been possible without paper. Without paper, there would have been no Renaissance. If there had been no paper, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. None of these statements is true.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

I was a theatre major and started off as a playwright.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.'

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

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

- Mark Kurlansky

I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.

- Mark Kurlansky

A water route to Chinese trade replacing the long, arduous Silk Road was a great dream of the Renaissance.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

I don't do much research on the Internet.

- Mark Kurlansky

Montserrat is a very pleasant place to do nothing. The islanders know this, and they know this is why tourists go there, but they are not totally comfortable with the notion.

- Mark Kurlansky

It's difficult when you travel around America to get local food; it used to be very easy. You went from town to town and were more in touch with things.

- Mark Kurlansky

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.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

I'm an urban person.

- Mark Kurlansky

When I was 13 or 14, I took this speed-reading course. A lot of the things you do in speed reading you shouldn't do to a good author, but I've been reading really fast ever since.

- Mark Kurlansky

People motivated by fear do not act well.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

I always wanted an extraordinary life. When it's over, I want to be able to say that I did it.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.

- Mark Kurlansky

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

- Mark Kurlansky

Americans are so egocentric.

- Mark Kurlansky