Career Quote by John Pomfret

Pomfret’s line cuts through the romantic mythology of journalism with a refreshingly transactional honesty: he wanted the passport stamps, and he wanted someone else to underwrite them. That bluntness is the point. In a profession that loves to sell itself as vocation, he admits to a motive closer to lifestyle design than martyrdom. It’s not cynical so much as clear-eyed about how careers actually form: people reverse-engineer work around the life they want, then retrofit a noble-sounding mission after the fact.

The subtext is a quiet demystification of foreign correspondence. “Living abroad” and “travel” are framed as the primary goods; journalism is the mechanism. That inversion matters because it exposes the genre’s seductive bargain: access in exchange for narrative labor. The reporter becomes a sanctioned drifter, granted proximity to history and culture, but only so long as they can translate it into readable dispatches. The “wanted to be paid” kicker lands like a wink at the economics of ambition, acknowledging that curiosity isn’t enough; you need an institution to bankroll it.

Contextually, it also gestures at a particular era of media when foreign bureaus still existed as attainable dreams and when “get paid to travel” felt less like influencer slang and more like a newsroom perk. Read today, it carries a faint elegy: the desire remains common, the funding far less so. Pomfret is describing a gateway drug to serious reporting, one powered not by ideology but by appetite.