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

Lawrence Wright

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

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

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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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" 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! "

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

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

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

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

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" 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

" Religions prosper in large part because of the communities that they create. "

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. "

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

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

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

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 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

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

Lawrence Wright

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

Lawrence Wright

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

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

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" 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. "

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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

" 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