Quotes from Lawrence Wright

I deplore sexual harassment.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.