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" 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

Think

World

American

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" Every form has its merits. And I like to work in a lot of different forms. "

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" I like the serendipitous surprises of reality. "

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" This age of terror will end one day, but whether our society can restore the feeling of freedom that once was our birthright is hard to predict. "

" If you look at all those terrorist groups - I'm talking, going back, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, ISIS - they're all proxy armies in an Islamic civil war. "

" To me the notion that Palestinians are actually Jews is, I think, quite revelatory and very radical and a possible bridge that has been ignored, I think, in this entire controversy and there's ample evidence to support it. "

Lawrence Wright

Support

Bridge

" I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife. "

" I was a very religious teenager, and I moved away from that. "

" 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. "

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

" I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. "

" 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. "

" Scientology is not a terrorist organization. Scientology has used intimidating tactics and vindictive litigation. "

" 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. "

" It's their belief, their own will, that holds people in Scientology, even oftentimes when they have been abused. "

" The 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. and coalition partners stands as one of the greatest blunders in American history. The Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, rose out of the the chaos, throwing the region into turmoil that hasn't been equaled since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. "

" When the price of oil goes up, the entire Texas economy takes a deep breath. Millionaires blossom like rain lilies. News races through the countryside that the money train is pulling into the station. Hop on board! "

" There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism. "

" Dallas was not a caring city, but it was efficient. "

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

" The Middle East has been a part of my life since I was a young man, when I went to teach in Cairo. "

" When I was working on the al-Zawahiri piece, a large part of it published in 'The New Yorker' in 2002, I had spoken to a lot of Zawahiri's friends, people who had been in prison with him, people that had been in al-Jihad with him. And quite to my surprise, they liked that article a lot. "

" 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

Faith

Believe

" For my parents, leaving the close social quarters of Abilene was like getting out of jail. They were not true West Texans; they had not come to love the unending monotony of mesquite barrens or the high, hot blue sky that made sunsets a matter of prayerful thankfulness. "

" 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! "

" I think the commentarian has taken over, so now what you get is a lot less reporting and more opinion. "

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

" If you call it al-Qaida or bin Ladenism or jihadism, whatever you call it, it's proliferated. "

" Religions prosper in large part because of the communities that they create. "

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

" I spent two years in Cairo, and I felt a certain urgency about trying to understand the region and the conflict here, in the modest way that a journalist might be able to try and shed some understanding and enlightenment on a region that is profoundly conflicted, and a conflict that has real consequences for Americans. "