Lawrence Wright

“I love apples. I actually do eat an apple a day.”

“Craziness doesn't have anything to do with how successful a religion might be.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I deplore sexual harassment.”

“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.”

“From the very beginning, when you go into Scientology your world narrows down very quickly.”

“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.”

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

“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!”

“The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.”

“A donkey is a very useful beast of burden.”

“Dallas was a place where dreamers like my father were given a chance.”

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

“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.”

“The lovely thing about the writing life is that you can point it in any direction.”

“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.”