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" I like the serendipitous surprises of reality. "

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

" 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

" A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page. "

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 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. "

Lawrence Wright

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

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

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

Lawrence Wright

" I love apples. I actually do eat an apple a day. "

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. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

" 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. "

Lawrence Wright

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

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

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

" If you look at Mormonism, it's a very appealing community. It takes care of itself; there are active charities. It's got a successful work ethic. Whatever you might think about the authenticity of their theology or their history, it's immaterial in terms of how the religion itself actually functions. "

Lawrence Wright

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

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

" A donkey is a very useful beast of burden. "

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 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

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

Lawrence Wright