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.

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.'

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.

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.

You could be a locavore in Florida or southern California. But I tried that. It was really limiting.

Before refrigeration, most food was heavily salted. Many of these salted foods have persisted, such as sauerkraut, pickles, cured anchovies, cheese, salted butter, ham, corned beef, sausage, and bacon. We still eat these things because we like them. But they are no longer the mainstay of our diet.

As with wine, geography affects the flavor. Oysters are usually named for a locale.

Europeans are far more anti-war than Americans. They've had more wars, and they really just don't believe in it any more. But Americans do.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

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

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

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.

Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.

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.

There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.

Working in a sugar mill is absolute misery for very little money.

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.