Mark Kurlansky Quotes

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Mark Kurlansky

Profession : Journalist

Birth : December 7, 1948

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

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'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Kurlansky

People motivated by fear do not act well.

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

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

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

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

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

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