Deborah Copaken Kogan

“I have an Emmy, but it's no big deal: work in TV news long enough, you eventually get one.”

“This is what sexism does best: it makes you feel crazy for desiring parity and hopeless about ever achieving it.”

“Photography forces one out into the world, interacting with people and the environment. It flexes all those right brain, spatially-adept muscles.”

“When it comes down to it, I believe that, having made the decision to bring children into the world, I owe it to them to be as present as I can in their daily lives and to try my best to stay alive until they've made it through to adulthood.”

“My husband and I were born three weeks apart, and our plan had always been to throw a joint party for our 40th birthdays.”

“I do miss the excitement of seeing history up close, of having intimate knowledge, through direct experience, of what happens when people and governments clash, but I do not miss the danger or the constant displacement.”

“I am nothing if not rational about what is worthy of my anxiety and what is not, and I refuse to live my life as if a giant bus is just around the corner, waiting to crush me the minute I step off the curb.”

“I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.”

“When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.”

“Because that was the problem, really, wasn’t it, with being human? You couldn’t just be, couldn’t just live and exist without dragging your feet through the mud. You had to communicate, congregate, collaborate, cohabiate. You had to corroborate. Copulate. You had to co-this, co-that, co—bloody-everything, and if you weren’t co-operating you were operating with the co, which was a declaration less of independence than of relativity. You could only really exist in relation to others.”

“Born in 1966, I came of age at the dawn of a revolution. The past was gone; we would move on and get over it!”

“I'd always assumed that by 40 I'd have at least a modicum of stability - a steady income, an established career, a bountiful fullness, like a pillow into which I could sink as I entered the second half of my life.”