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.

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

I went back to the States and started at a small newspaper in Riverside County, California, covering the police; I was making $280 a week covering the police.

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

I'm lucky that I have whatever I had that makes me have a successful career, if you will.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.