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" Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society. "

Lawrence Wright

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" The lovely thing about the writing life is that you can point it in any direction. "

Lawrence Wright

" Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11. "

Lawrence Wright

" People often pulled into Scientology want to address personal problems in their life, and Scientology says we have technology that addresses these kinds of problems. Just focusing on the problems and trying to remedy them can be helpful. "

Lawrence Wright

" If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people. "

Lawrence Wright

" Dallas was a place where dreamers like my father were given a chance. "

Lawrence Wright

" Scientology plays an outsize role in the cast of new religions that have arisen in the 20th century and survived into the 21st. "

Lawrence Wright

" I don't hold America responsible for the largely oppressive governments in the 22 Arab countries. There are repressive Arab governments that are our allies and there are those that are our nominal enemies. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference to what extent we're involved in propping up those governments. "

Lawrence Wright

" To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea - remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers. "

Lawrence Wright

" Every medium has its advantages and weaknesses and there are many things I can put down on paper that I might not be able to put into film or into a stage performance. In each form, one can communicate powerfully in different ways. "

Lawrence Wright

" Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it. "

Lawrence Wright

" If you get into Scientology, you will go to auditing. It's like therapy except that there is an E-meter between you and your auditor. That's a device that actually measures your galvanic skin responses. It's two metal cans that you hold. They used to be Campbell's Soup cans with the label scraped off. "

Lawrence Wright

" I deplore sexual harassment. "

Lawrence Wright

" Oftentimes, when I was reporting on conflict somewhere in the world or prison or wherever I might be, I'd be struck by the fact that religious beliefs were sometimes transformative, sometimes a motivation for violence. "

Lawrence Wright

" When I went to Egypt right after 9/11 I was very upset. I used to live in Egypt. I had a lot of friends there. I spent two years teaching there. I had very fond feelings for that part of the world, and the fact that a culture I liked so much had attacked my own culture was really very upsetting to me. "

Lawrence Wright

" What is interesting to me about film, and documentary film in particular, is that I can write about these people, and you trust my judgment, more or less, but when you're confronted yourself with humans who are right there on the screen telling you their story, you make a judgment yourself that is conclusive. "

Lawrence Wright

" Hubbard set up the Church of Scientology in Hollywood in 1954 for a reason. He understood that celebrity was increasingly a feature of American public life, and celebrities themselves were going to be worshiped as minor deities were in the ancient world. The idea was: if you could get them, think how many people would follow. "

Lawrence Wright

" I was in Austin on 9/11, and there were no flights, so I couldn't get to New York to cover the story, so I had to find more creative ways. "

Lawrence Wright

" Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already. "

Lawrence Wright

" The Israelis and the Palestinians don't know each other. They live right there, but they've become strangers. And it makes it much more difficult to make peace with a person you really don't know, and that's an obstacle in itself. "

Lawrence Wright

" I've always worried that one day women would figure out how to get along without us and they would be able to reproduce unilaterally, like sponges. "

Lawrence Wright

" There are many countries where you can only believe more or you can believe less. But in the United States we have this incredible smorgasbord, and it really interests me why people are drawn to one faith rather than another, especially to a system of belief that to an outsider seems absurd or dangerous. "

Lawrence Wright

" People love to talk about the things that are important to them, but oftentimes as a journalist, if you're entering a world that's pretty esoteric and difficult to penetrate and has many barriers to outsiders, then the people inside that world just don't have the same language as you do. "

Lawrence Wright

" I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system. "

Lawrence Wright

" When I was in the ninth grade, I had a teacher in Dallas, Texas, named Elizabeth Enlow in English class. Every Friday, we had to write a little essay, and you had to incorporate three particular words into the story. That was the sole direction. And to me, this was so much fun. "

Lawrence Wright

" From the very beginning of this movement, Scientology has always been a very closeted organization. That aura of secrecy is something that the present-day management continues. "

Lawrence Wright

" Craziness doesn't have anything to do with how successful a religion might be. "

Lawrence Wright

" If you're on a contract at 'The New Yorker,' the contract specifies the number of words you will publish in the magazine per year. I get paid by the word, like most writers. That's one reason why the Scientology article was 25,000 words long! "

Lawrence Wright

" I'm grateful for the ascendancy of women in business and politics, which may yet advance the humanity of those callings. "

Lawrence Wright

" I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another. "

Lawrence Wright

" When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me. "

Lawrence Wright