Quotes from John Pomfret

Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.

For me the much more significant question is what did the Americans do, if anything, to help the Croatian army, because they are the ones that changed fundamentally the map of Bosnia, not the Bosnian army.

My main form of transportation at that time was a bicycle, because bicycles could move though the crowd.

The desire to become a journalist came really because I very much like living abroad, and like to travel, and wanted to be paid for it.

I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.

The work is a calling. It demands that type of obsession.

And when they do spin out of control there are important ramifications that affect America, not just its direct national interest but its broader interests as a nation which has thought of itself as a beacon to other nations, of freedom, liberty, democracy, whatever.

Stanford had no journalism program so I just learned by doing, effectively.

I've been shot at on numerous occasions.

Working overseas is more difficult in that it's much more complicated to get people to open their hearts to you and to tell you information.

I think some of the best reporters are the ones who can really illustrate the differences between societies, at the same time trying to connect the fact that there are a lot of shared values in addition to those differences.