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.

I'd wear nice clothes and brush my teeth more often if I cared about what people thought.

I was listening to punk rock in the '70s as a young kid, but all by myself; I never met anyone that listened to that kind of music. Just by chance, I was in detention, and one of the guys in the class was Van Conner... I started talking to him and found out that we listened to some of the same music.

The first music I heard that made me put away my comic books and make music was original punk.

I was in Screaming Trees - I wasn't really interested in playing quiet music in a live setting. But I would get asked quite often to do a show or open for somebody, and I always said no. Finally, I was asked if I would open for Johnny Cash, and Johnny Cash was one of my dad's favorite heroes. So that's why I started doing solo shows.

I grew up a Seattle Sonics fan, in Washington state.

I've learned that sticking around counts for something.

I had a lot of jobs when I was younger. Where I grew up, there was a lot of agricultural jobs, so I worked on a lot of farms. I worked in the pea fields, harvesting peas.

Soundgarden are good friends of mine.

Have I tried a black pudding? I'll eat anything - I'm not finicky - but that's not to say it takes any courage to eat black puddings because I find them delicious.

Nothing seems too weird to me anymore.

It took me quite a while to find my natural voice. I'm glad I stuck around long enough to see that happen.

When I was a kid in the late '60s and early '70s, my parents and their friends would play the records of Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como, music with string arrangements and men singing songs that sounded sad whether they were or not.

I guess if you live long enough, anything can happen.

Whether I live there again or not, Seattle will always be my home.

I don't think I've ever gotten to the point where I sent out Christmas cards! But if I did, they would have to feature my pets, that's for sure.

When I do something, I do it for the specified amount of time, and then I do something else.

I like Jamal Crawford. He's from Seattle, went to high school there, lived up there. He's fantastic.

The Trees was four complete nuts. We didn't have a damn thing in common except insanity. So we fought a lot. And we had two brothers - who fought like brothers.