138 Quotes by Lawrence Wright

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

The U.S. is such an unusual place in the world because you can believe anything you want.

If you call it al-Qaida or bin Ladenism or jihadism, whatever you call it, it's proliferated.

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

Scientology plays an outsize role in the cast of new religions that have arisen in the 20th century and survived into the 21st.

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 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.