138 Quotes by Lawrence Wright

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.

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.

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.

Contempt for men pervades the most obscure strata of our society.

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.