Joe Sacco Quotes

I'm an artist and a journalist. I travel around the world very often for 'Vice Magazine,' and I draw and I write about prisons, about conflict zones.

I think any journalist who spends time in a place realizes that there are lots of stories around beyond their primary story. You meet so many interesting people and have all kinds of experiences.

My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.

I feel like, in some ways, I'm just a journalist.

One of the exciting things about reporting is going to places you've never been to before.

Very few people are fortunate enough to walk through countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and I had seen them all. I had spoken to many on the street.

The idea of being a foreign correspondent and wandering the world and witnessing great events, having adventures and covering the activities of world leaders, appealed to me greatly. It was a very glamorous life in those days.

The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.

The people with the passports, the people who travel more, tend to be the most understanding. And it's ironic that the people who travel the least have the strongest opinions about the people they've never met.

I spent two years in Cairo, and I felt a certain urgency about trying to understand the region and the conflict here, in the modest way that a journalist might be able to try and shed some understanding and enlightenment on a region that is profoundly conflicted, and a conflict that has real consequences for Americans.

My dad was a journalist. One great trip we took was to Israel. We went there and drove through the whole country, and it was pretty incredible. We went to the Philippines and saw the beauty of that country but also what poverty really looks like. That had a profound effect on me.

Being a journalist always makes you a quick study of wherever you're at. You're out all the time and seeing places that normally you wouldn't get to see. It gives you an unusual level of insight into any place.

Going to Russia is going to be nothing for me. I'm going to treat it like it's the U.S. because, at the end of the day, it's one man, one ring.

A big part of reporting is just being present. You have to show up ten days in a row to get the one telling detail.

Growing up, I wanted to be a journalist. I was in love with Lisa Ling, who's a broadcast journalist and who travels the world. I used to read all of her articles and watch her when she'd go to China or South Africa or Australia. I thought that was the coolest job because she got to travel and tell people's stories.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you're going to see your country differently, you're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like.

There are so many American experiences that we can't know about unless we venture out to create a dialogue, to observe, ask questions, and stay there for a while.

Journalism is not writing.

I've been a journalist for too long to stop calling myself a journalist, and also when I'm doing 'Fake or Fortune?' I'm going through a rigorous investigation.

In 2013 and 2014, I traveled to Ukraine three times with Senator John McCain.

I have interviewed Hugo Chavez, Tim McVeigh, and hundreds of fascinating characters in South America, where I have lived for the past 15 years.

There are other people, other economies, governments, cultures, religions, and destinies going on at the same time as yours. You have to widen the scope of your lens and start seeing more. Because Americans, it's easy to make us freak out. When the going gets rough, you have to get conservative. That's what's happened to America in the last eight years. I just try to point out that there's more going on than most people pay attention to.

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.