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.

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.

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.

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

I get up very early and write a lot.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.