When Ozzie Virgil became the first Dominican player in the majors, his nationality was barely noticed. What the press and fans talked about was his skin color. He was the first black player on the Detroit Tigers, and a great deal of attention was paid to him as someone who crossed the color line.

I am of that '60s generation, and for people of my age, that phrase 'change the world' has a real resonance.

I'm usually writing about survival. I never planned it, but it runs through all my books.

I'm friends with Studs Terkel.

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

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.

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

When you're in theater, you inevitably wind up working in restaurants. I made pastry.

Chroniclers of the role of paper in history are given to extravagant pronouncements: Architecture would not have been possible without paper. Without paper, there would have been no Renaissance. If there had been no paper, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. None of these statements is true.

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.

I don't do much research on the Internet.

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.

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

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.

I wrote a children's book because children have the most open minds. They are the people who really want to learn.

Adults have pretty much made up their minds - they like you to the extent that you confirm what they already believe.

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.

Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.

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.

Americans are so egocentric.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

History shows that any attempt by government to interfere in the consumption of salt is always extremely unpopular.

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 think food is very important to how we live as people and as families.

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.

I get up very early and write a lot.

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

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.

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.

'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.

Children ask questions much more than adults do, and you have to wonder if this is something we have that we lose.

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.