“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.”
“Adrian Leon LeBlanc, my dad and my namesake, his keen joy in observing people and the world is the reason I became a journalist.”
“As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'”
“I like to say, 'You get as much story as you can take.' But you have to effectively render it.”
“I think you end up on the lucky side, or you don't.”
“Illness transforms the things you most fear into the things you crave and would hold onto if you could.”
“It shouldn't be a matter of who deserves help or not, but of whether we want to be a country that allows its neediest to continue to need. Condemnation of individuals and their choices mutes all these other really important logistical questions about funding and budget and politics.”
“It's hard for me to understand how poverty can be invisible to so many people, since I see it everywhere. Readers sometimes think this world is so different; on the one hand, they feel connected to the people I'm writing about, and on the other hand, they're saying their lives are a world away.”
“My dad taught me that language was a powerful tool.”
“My earnestness at the injustices I witnessed when I was writing 'Random Family' may have been my gravest reportorial offense during the early years of reporting. When I discuss the book with students, they often ask me how I could 'stand by' in the face of so much suffering; the egregiousness wasn't my powerlessness but my surprise.”
“Satisfaction isn't a state that comes easily to me.”
“Serious loss brings you into one of the world's silent fraternities.”
“The best comics enlist you to take accountability for who you are, whether you like it or not.”
“There's one thing I know for sure: When I'm most opinionated, my writing sucks.”
“What one reads in the newspaper and what one sees on the street are absolutely not the same.”
