It goes back to Aristotle's idea that tragedy has a cathartic effect on the audience, ... The experience purges you and leaves you a healthier person.

[But can Tolstoy, Melville or Austen actually cure depression? Can they rid you of anxiety? Un-stress your mind?] I'm skeptical of the ability -- the literal ability -- of literature to heal, ... But there's another part of me that says, 'Who knows?' So much of medicine is reliant upon rhetoric.

Perhaps we are guilty of settling in to too comfortable a journalistic pattern, and perhaps this tragedy did serve as a reminder that this is what we do. I think too many people had forgotten that. There is a reason we show up after awful events. We really were the viewers' advocates on this.

If the sky falls, there'll be a bigger sky behind it.

For the people who experience it, it's a tragedy, but for the country as a whole, we can absorb it.

You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.