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

Lawrence Wright

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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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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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

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

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

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

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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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

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

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

" 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! "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

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

Lawrence Wright

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

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

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

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