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

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.

Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Beware of fish that is very inexpensive.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.