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

Lawrence Wright

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" Societies that depend on natural resources tend to have certain inherent problems. The limited concentration of wealth - whether from oil, coal, diamonds, or bauxite - often leads to corruption and authoritarianism. "

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

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

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

Lawrence Wright

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

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

" The U.S. is such an unusual place in the world because you can believe anything you want. "

Lawrence Wright

" In places where money comes out of the ground, luck and a willingness to take risks are the main denominators that determine one's future, not talent or education or hard work. Money that is so easily acquired somehow comes to seem well deserved, because those who have it must be either uniquely perspicacious or divinely favored. "

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

" 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. "

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

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

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

" I don't dispute Scientology can help people; I think that is a very important fact to keep in mind. "

Lawrence Wright

" When you're first starting on a project, you feel shy because you don't know very much, and you know that you're going to be ignorant and seem ignorant. "

Lawrence Wright

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

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

" 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

" I like the serendipitous surprises of reality. "

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

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

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" Certainly, the two things Scientology has on its side are money and lawyers, but those qualities won't save it if it can't find a way to bring new members into the fold. "

Lawrence Wright