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" I got my initiation into the Middle East in 1969 when I went there to teach at the American University in Cairo for two years. "

Lawrence Wright

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" 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! "

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

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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. "

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" 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. "

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

Lawrence Wright

" You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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" The ideal 'New Yorker' profile is a person, an interesting person, at a critical point in his life. "

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" Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody. "

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" 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. "

Lawrence Wright

" IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not. "

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

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

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

" 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

" 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

" I deplore sexual harassment. "

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

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

Lawrence Wright

" I get very antsy when I'm not occupied. "

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

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

Lawrence Wright

" There are a lot of reporters who I feel are a lot more courageous and fool-hardy than I am. Maybe at the top I'd put Dexter Filkins. He's an extraordinary man in terms of his nerve and ability to get into dangerous situations and tell the story cogently. He's bringing back real human stories. I admire that. "

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

" From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly. "

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

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

Lawrence Wright

" What I've learned is that everybody really wants to sell their story. No matter who they are, everybody feels that what they're doing is the right thing, and if they could only explain themselves to a reasonable person that understands them, then maybe they'll listen. "

Lawrence Wright

The Right Thing

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

Lawrence Wright