Lawrence Wright
A donkey is a very useful beast of burden.
A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page.
Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11.
I deplore sexual harassment.
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.
Scientology plays an outsize role in the cast of new religions that have arisen in the 20th century and survived into the 21st.
The U.S. is such an unusual place in the world because you can believe anything you want.
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 call it al-Qaida or bin Ladenism or jihadism, whatever you call it, it's proliferated.
It's their belief, their own will, that holds people in Scientology, even oftentimes when they have been abused.
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.
I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
I like the serendipitous surprises of reality.
Every form has its merits. And I like to work in a lot of different forms.
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.
To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea - remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers.
I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another.
I think the commentarian has taken over, so now what you get is a lot less reporting and more opinion.
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.
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.
Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society.
I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system.
From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly.
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.
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.
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.
I don't dispute Scientology can help people; I think that is a very important fact to keep in mind.
IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not.
Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already.
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.
I get very antsy when I'm not occupied.
There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism.
Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.
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.
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.
I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.
You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.
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.
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.
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.
I love apples. I actually do eat an apple a day.
If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.
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.
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!
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.
Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it.
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.
I've always worried that one day women would figure out how to get along without us and they would be able to reproduce unilaterally, like sponges.
I'm grateful for the ascendancy of women in business and politics, which may yet advance the humanity of those callings.
Dallas was a place where dreamers like my father were given a chance.