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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.

Lawrence Wright

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Lawrence Wright
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: August 2
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Oklahoma City
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More quotes by Lawrence Wright

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Paralysis, anxiety stomachs, arthritis and many ills and aberrations have been relieved by auditing them. An E-Meter shows them up and makes them confess their misdeeds. They are probably just compartments of the mind which, cut off, begin to act as though they were persons.
Lawrence Wright
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From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly.
Lawrence Wright
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I grew up in the American South, the segregated South. Now we have a black man who is president. It was an age of apartheid, and now that's over. It was an age of two superpowers frozen in a cold war, and now that's resolved. So history marches on, except for this Arab-Israel conflict, which seems to have a claim on being eternal.
Lawrence Wright
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I don't dispute Scientology can help people I think that is a very important fact to keep in mind.
Lawrence Wright
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Look at what Jimmy Carter did. Look at the risks he took for a country that wasn't his. Israel has benefited unbelievably from that. To fail to give him credit seems unfair.
Lawrence Wright
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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.
Lawrence Wright
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I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.
Lawrence Wright
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When you look at the science and the genetic studies that have been done on Palestinians and Jews, you find that there is a unity. They're both descended from the Canaanites. They're essentially the same people.
Lawrence Wright
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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.
Lawrence Wright
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I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.
Lawrence Wright
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Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.
Lawrence Wright
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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.
Lawrence Wright
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Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already.
Lawrence Wright
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Having written Camp David as a drama, I could see the drama maybe a little more clearly when I wrote the book.
Lawrence Wright
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I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system.
Lawrence Wright
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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.
Lawrence Wright
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You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.
Lawrence Wright
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I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.
Lawrence Wright
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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.
Lawrence Wright
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If we're talking about Sinai, we can't understand it without the 1967 and 1973 wars, and you can't understand it without the biblical story of Moses leading his people through the wilderness. These are essential elements in the modern conversation about what's going on in the Middle East that seem to have been lost.
Lawrence Wright