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" When I was in the ninth grade, I had a teacher in Dallas, Texas, named Elizabeth Enlow in English class. Every Friday, we had to write a little essay, and you had to incorporate three particular words into the story. That was the sole direction. And to me, this was so much fun. "

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" 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. "

Lawrence Wright

Film

Down

Stage

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

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

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

" 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. "

" From the very beginning of this movement, Scientology has always been a very closeted organization. That aura of secrecy is something that the present-day management continues. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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! "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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! "

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

" 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. "

Lawrence Wright

Support

Bridge

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I deplore sexual harassment. "

Lawrence Wright

Sexual

Harassment

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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