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" 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. "

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" Life gives you so many alternatives to choose from, and... you judge these as best as you can until something comes along like 9/11. And it's the central event of my lifetime, so I knew I had to write about that. "

Lawrence Wright

Judge

You

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I deplore sexual harassment. "

Lawrence Wright

Sexual

Harassment

" 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. "

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

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

" I guess I made a resolution years ago that I would only do things that were only really important or really fun. "

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

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

" 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

Word

Movement

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

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