Havana, for all its smells, sweat, crumbling walls, isolation, and difficult history, is the most romantic city in the world.

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.

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.

Cheap fish has usually been caught in careless ways.

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.

Paper is at the center of so many of the elements of the development of civilization.

The environmental movement does not always have to be about stopping things. It can be about fixing problems.

People motivated by fear do not act well.

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.

I'm interested in most everything.

I sometimes think there is nothing really to be said about a novel but 'read the book.' I have a jaundiced view of literary critics.

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

I'm an urban person.

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 always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.

I was a theatre major and started off as a playwright.

It's harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done.

I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don't want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.

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.