30 Quotes by John Pomfret

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.

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

One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that's just a fact of life.

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.

I was posted to China in the summer of 1988, which was the greatest time ever, I think, to have been in China.

But the difference is that in an overseas assignment there is an emphasis on the facts but there's also a much greater emphasis on interpretation.

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.

I think you're a witness and a recorder.

I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad.