Journalist

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.

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.

People motivated by fear do not act well.

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

Before Birdseye, hardly anybody ate frozen food because it was awful.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.