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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.”

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

“It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968”

“I'm interested in most everything.”

“People motivated by fear do not act well.”

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

“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.”

“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.”