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.
— Lawrence Wright
If you call it al-Qaida or bin Ladenism or jihadism, whatever you call it, it's proliferated.
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.
I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
I think the commentarian has taken over, so now what you get is a lot less reporting and more opinion.
I guess I made a resolution years ago that I would only do things that were only really important or really fun.
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.
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.
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.
The Middle East has been a part of my life since I was a young man, when I went to teach in Cairo.
Religions prosper in large part because of the communities that they create.
The ideal 'New Yorker' profile is a person, an interesting person, at a critical point in his life.
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.
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'm grateful for the ascendancy of women in business and politics, which may yet advance the humanity of those callings.
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.
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.
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.
It's their belief, their own will, that holds people in Scientology, even oftentimes when they have been abused.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Craziness doesn't have anything to do with how successful a religion might be.
Scientology is not a terrorist organization. Scientology has used intimidating tactics and vindictive litigation.
Dallas was not a caring city, but it was efficient.
Dallas was a place where dreamers like my father were given a chance.
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.
Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it.
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!
Our intelligence community was extremely poorly prepared before 9/11.
I've always been intrigued by why people believe one thing over another.
A donkey is a very useful beast of burden.
Every form has its merits. And I like to work in a lot of different forms.
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.
I was a very religious teenager, and I moved away from that.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
The lovely thing about the writing life is that you can point it in any direction.
To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea - remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers.
I deplore sexual harassment.
Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society.
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.
