Work Quote by John Pomfret

There is a quiet admission of powerlessness baked into Pomfret's line, and that is precisely why it lands. People like to imagine overseas reporting or diplomacy as a matter of toughness and hustle: show up, ask questions, file the story. Pomfret instead points to the real bottleneck: access to someone else's interior life. "Open their hearts" is deliberately intimate language, almost soft to the point of discomfort, and it reframes information-gathering as an emotional transaction rather than a purely professional one.

The subtext is that "information" abroad is rarely just sitting there, waiting to be extracted. It is guarded by fear, pride, trauma, local politics, and the simple fact that outsiders are often seen as temporary and therefore unsafe. "Much more complicated" does double duty: it gestures at language barriers, surveillance, and cultural codes, but it also hints at a moral complication. When you need people to "tell you information", you're asking them to assume risk so you can do your job. Trust becomes both the method and the ethical battleground.

Pomfret's phrasing suggests hard-earned experience in places where the stakes are uneven: the outsider may lose a story; the local source may lose far more. The line is also a corrective to the romantic myth of the foreign correspondent as lone truth-hunter. Abroad, truth is relational. It has to be invited out, and the invitation costs time, humility, and often a willingness to be changed by what you hear.