"I have seen a lot of foreign correspondents get totally freaked out by being called back home. There is a kind of freedom to being an expatriate... The freedom and the ability to reinvent yourself I think psychologically is something that keeps foreign correspondents overseas."
Barbara Demick - Los Angeles Times (Seoul, South Korea)

"People don't understand how hard life is in this part of the world. The simplest of things like making a phone call or taking a sick child to a doctor... Getting a government document can be a nightmare here; it can take days or it could not happen at all."
Terry Friel - Reuters (New Delhi, India)

"Sometimes it can be a little overwhelming when one thing happens in the Middle East and you get three different interpretations, three different spins. Trying to sift through that and come up with a comprehensive story that goes right down the middle sometimes can be challenging."
Janine Zacharia - Jerusalem Post (Washington, D.C.)

"I would be lying if I didn't say that there is a sort of boys' own juvenile adventure sort of ethic that sweeps through war correspondents, being around big machinery and guns and things that go boom... For a long time I had a very rather juvenile ambition that I wanted to get shot at."
Alex Perry - Time magazine (New Delhi, India)

"An inexperienced young girl is not the kind of person you'd expect to report the opening of World War II."
Clare Hollingworth, describing her work on the Polish-German border in 1939 for the Daily Telegraph

"I think I have one quality that has really stood me in good stead as a reporter, and that's being relentless. I think it's all very good to be intelligent and know languages and do research and have a certain amount of charm. But I don't think anything trumps being relentless."
Ann Louise Bardach - journalist and author on Cuba

"While journalists are very good at criticizing the way in which the world works, thank God they don't run it."
Thomas Crampton - International Herald Tribune (Hong Kong, China)

"You can never please everybody, I mean the biggest bitches are the people in the press corps, always!"
Hugh van Es - photojournalist (Hong Kong, China)

"[In] a world without media, people would be completely in the dark. The only thing they would hear is what the politicians tell them. A world just run by politicians, it would be a world where the ordinary people would never have a chance to know what the truth is... The best thing media can do is bring light to people, they can never bring truth to people, never objectivity, but they can try to bring light into this darkness."
Charles Ritterband - Neue Zuercher Zeitung (Vienna, Austria)

"I used to think that covering war was terrifically exciting. But after you've covered it for a while, after you have gone to one village after another and seen one refugee camp after another, and after you have these experiences seeing people who have been killed, you sort of wonder, are you exploiting their suffering? You feel like you are exploiting their suffering. I began to feel, what was I doing here and what was all this about?"
Don Kirk - International Herald Tribune (Seoul, South Korea)

"I was interested in taking risks, of doing things that sometimes maybe other people didn't do."
Gary Marx - Chicago Tribune (Havana correspondent)

"The greater dangers [of foreign reporting] are to the family life and how it kind of wrecks it. You risk chasing too hard and not paying enough attention to those who need your love and your warmth and your care. You are too busy chasing the big story."
Bryan Pearson - Agence France-Presse (New Delhi, India)