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" 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. "

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

Mark Kurlansky

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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

History

Food

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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