Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
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.
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.
If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod... But it has among its predators - man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod.
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.
A gourmet knows that the best part is not always the expensive part, and he will find that part, and then he will share it. A gourmet should want to share.
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.'
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Socialist government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques.
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.
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.
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.
There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chloride is essential for digestion and in respiration. Without sodium, which the body cannot manufacture, the body would be unable to transport nutrients or oxygen, transmit nerve impulses, or move muscles, including the heart.
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.
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.
A superpower that no longer stands for anything, that no one believes in anymore, that is seen only as a bully, will fall despite its military might. If the Bush administration ever wanted to reflect on history, it might think about this.
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.
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.
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.
Whenever I was called a gourmet, I suspected I was being accused of something at least slightly unpleasant. But that was before I heard the term "foodie." I am still not sure that a gourmet is a good thing to be, but it must be better than a foodie.
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.
Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.