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" To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea - remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers. "
Lawrence Wright
Small
Forever
Strangers
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" I get very antsy when I'm not occupied. "
Lawrence Wright
Very
Antsy
Get
" It's their belief, their own will, that holds people in Scientology, even oftentimes when they have been abused. "
Lawrence Wright
Been
Will
People
" Craziness doesn't have anything to do with how successful a religion might be. "
Lawrence Wright
Anything
How
Religion
" You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand. "
Lawrence Wright
Want
Understand
Story
" 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
Like
You
" There are a lot of reporters who I feel are a lot more courageous and fool-hardy than I am. Maybe at the top I'd put Dexter Filkins. He's an extraordinary man in terms of his nerve and ability to get into dangerous situations and tell the story cogently. He's bringing back real human stories. I admire that. "
Lawrence Wright
Back
Story
Man
" I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. "
Lawrence Wright
Vietnam
Vietnam War
War
" 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
Education
Future
Work
" 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
Teach
Life
Man
" 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
Find
New
New York
" People often pulled into Scientology want to address personal problems in their life, and Scientology says we have technology that addresses these kinds of problems. Just focusing on the problems and trying to remedy them can be helpful. "
Lawrence Wright
People
Problems
Want
" 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
Two
American
Years
" I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife. "
Lawrence Wright
Terrorism
About
Strife
" 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
You
New
Long
" 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
Motivation
Conflict
World
" 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
Corruption
Wealth
Problems
" 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
Right
You
Strangers
" The ideal 'New Yorker' profile is a person, an interesting person, at a critical point in his life. "
Lawrence Wright
Life
New
Interesting
" 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
Yourself
Story
Trust
" 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
Friends
Surprise
Prison
" Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody. "
Lawrence Wright
Everybody
Journalism
Rule
" IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not. "
Lawrence Wright
Religion
Very
IRS
" I think the commentarian has taken over, so now what you get is a lot less reporting and more opinion. "
Lawrence Wright
Now
Opinion
Think
" 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
Listen
The Right Thing
Story
" 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
Language
You
World
" I deplore sexual harassment. "
Lawrence Wright
Sexual
Harassment
" 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
Think
World
American
" Dallas was not a caring city, but it was efficient. "
Lawrence Wright
Caring
Dallas
Efficient
" The lovely thing about the writing life is that you can point it in any direction. "
Lawrence Wright
Life
Writing
You
" 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. "
Lawrence Wright
You
War
Talking