Quote

What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read.

Even though it has been very painful, lots of opportunities have come forward journalistically. Once all of this blows over, I think it might actually help that I have gotten this attention.

Like everybody, I've had a lot of pain in my life and I'm a work in progress. You must have a true desire to see the world from a different point of view, and that comes with growing up.

An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.

I don't know how much you follow current events. For some, there's not enough time to keep up on what's happening; for others, the news is too depressing, and peering too deeply fills one with boiling frustration all too quickly.

One day I was sitting in my own pain, and suddenly all the pain and troubles of the world came to me. I received all the pain of the world, all through my body.

The world's treated me awfully well, and I guess it's crept into my work.

With all the chaos, pain and suffering in the world, the fact that my adoption of a child from who was living in an orphanage, you know, was the number one story for a week in the world. To me, that says more about our inability to focus on the real problems.

I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren't much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I've seen and heard.