Quotes from Lawrence Wright

The Borough of Manhattan gratefully declared March 13 (Hubbard's birthday), 2004, as "Hubbard Detoxification Day.

The struggle of Islam, as Qutb had framed it, and as Azzam deeply believed, was against jahiliya -- the world of unbelief that had existed before Islam, which was still corrupting and undermining the faithful with the lures of materialism, secularism, and sexual equality.

She was made to stand in a garbage can for twelve hours, as the other detainees demanded that she confess her own "homosexual tendencies.

Howard Markel estimates that the total number of Americans who died of the 1918 pandemic was between 500,000 and 750,000; the

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.

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.

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 deplore sexual harassment.

Religions prosper in large part because of the communities that they create.

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.

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!

The Middle East has been a part of my life since I was a young man, when I went to teach in Cairo.