My purpose at that time was to expand my experience of the world and to immerse myself as deeply as I could in powerful events that I thought would begin to help me understand the world, and myself, in larger ways. Looking back, it's difficult to imagine my life without the Congo now.

When people know what you want, they can then manipulate that to achieve the end that they seek. It's far more interesting and valuable to bear witness to a scene and make good relationships without explicitly seeking something. You're more likely to obtain a far richer and honest experience that way.

I certainly think that many of the themes, and many of the ways that I wrote about Congo, will continue to live on in my work. One of the fundamental aspects of my work is for myself and the reader to see the world that they think they know in a different way.

My own chief curiosity is to go into the world and explore as richly as I can, and as deeply as I can, and understand its richness as fully as I can, and that certainly will live on.

Living somewhere permanently, you have a stake in society. I had no stake. It did not matter to my life which way the war turned, and I think that gave a certain purity to the endeavor that I undertook. I see it as something positive, something that helps me conduct the kind of reporting that I wanted to do.