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.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

What worries me is that 'post-racial' America is not that different from the Americas that have preceded us, and it might not ever be.