Whereas with foreign coverage there's a much broader disconnect between you and your audience.

But on the other hand, in the midst of the chaos, you find normal people. You find people who are willing to risk their lives to tell you what they saw, even though they have no dog in the fight.

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.

When I see somebody being mistreated, my eyes tear up and I want to stop it. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to write about it, because if I insert myself into the equation it doesn't really do much good, but if I write about it I think it could do more good.

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

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

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

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 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.

Whereas with foreign coverage there's a much broader disconnect between you and your audience.

And then I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to China in 1980, which was quite early.

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.

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 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've been shot at on numerous occasions.

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 grew up in New York City in the late '70s, at a time when U.S. - China relations were something that was on the front page of The New York Times on a regular basis.

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.

The one indication that I got that I was doing the right job in Bosnia was that at different periods of time all the factions came down very hard on me.

When you do a job like this you have to like having cold sweat on your back.

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.

A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.

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

Srebrenica was a horrendous war crime and it had to be uncovered.

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 had my life threatened by Bosnian Serbs on numerous occasions.

In some ways the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything.

I think that's the main threat in Bosnia and Rwanda and Zaire. There doesn't seem to be much willingness to engage these problems unless they directly affect national security interests.

I guess I didn't enjoy drawing very much. It was like homework.

It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.

I've always wanted to be Batman, but I don't naturally tend towards Batman. I tend towards Robin, but I did get to play Superman.

Truth is, I’m generally happiest when it’s just me. It’s okay to be madly in love with yourself.

I've done everything. Selling door-to-door fire extinguishers... In bars, I used to repair those machines that have 10 different buttons on them to spray club soda and seltzer.

I don't think anybody accepts the idea that somehow I should be punished because I actually served our country during a very difficult time post-9/11. That required me to actually be out of Arkansas for a few years.

It's a life of five-card draw, and you know what? When God asked me - I'm fine with the card I got. I'm gonna play this.

When I came to office, in terms of diplomacy and national security, as well as the economy, Japan was in a very severe situation.

I'm still that rowdy dude who has after-parties in his dressing room with a concert-sized PA system blasting away.

In the real world, 90% of the money spent on medical research is focused on conditions that are responsible for just 10% of the deaths and disability caused by diseases globally.

I see myself as writing biographies, the complete story of someone's life.

In North America, many fans know Cristiano Ronaldo's smirk and can recognize Didier Drogba in a commercial. Maybe they know too much for the good of M.L.S.

I do still get shocked every once in a while when I catch my reflection when I'm walking past a glass building, but it's in my mind about getting older and finding out what I'm going to look like as it unfolds - or as it folds, depending on where the marks and scars land.

There's nothing special about wireless networks except that wireless capacity is sometimes less than what you can get, for example, from optical fiber.

As far as my favorite sites, I do a lot of mundane stuff on line because I travel so much.

Some of the best ideas come from sheer discovery, and not by some masterminded, preconceived genius.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

My two sons are the biggest pigs - always dirty, sweaty, burping and farting.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

When I was 5 years old, my best friends were Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen because we lived across the street from each other.

Crystals amplify the consciousness.