Quotes from Mark Kurlansky

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

Americans are so egocentric.

A Wedding In Haiti is a great experience and its unaffected prose is as true a portrait of complex Haiti as you will find.

Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.

The egg creams of Avenue A in New York and the root beer float....are among the high points of American gastronomic inventiveness.

Judging foods without regard to price is a rich mans game, and yet poor people can be gourmets able to discern a good potato from a bad one.

In 'The Republic' he [Plato] states that the enjoyment of food is not a true pleasure because the purpose of eating is to relieve pain - hunger.

In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.

ENEMIES OFTEN become mirror images of each other.

Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means "one who lives in hiding or under cover." The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning "salt." They were the salt people.

Salt is so common, so easy to obtain, and so inexpensive that we have forgotten that from the beginning of civilization until about 100 years ago, salt was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history.

I did not realize at the time, as I have discovered since, that anyone who attempts any thing original in this world must expect a bit of ridicule." Clarence Birdseye

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