I deplore sexual harassment.

I get very antsy when I'm not occupied.

A donkey is a very useful beast of burden.

I like the serendipitous surprises of reality.

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

Dallas was not a caring city, but it was efficient.

I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.

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

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

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

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

Scientology is probably the most stigmatized religion in America already.

Unlike the talent for war, the ability to make peace has always been rare.

Every form has its merits. And I like to work in a lot of different forms.

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

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

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

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

Chronology can be dangerous. You can get so linear that it becomes robotic for the reader.

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

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not.

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

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

I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system.

I don't dispute Scientology can help people; I think that is a very important fact to keep in mind.

The ideal 'New Yorker' profile is a person, an interesting person, at a critical point in his life.

I think the commentarian has taken over, so now what you get is a lot less reporting and more opinion.

Islam and the West have clashed in the past and have not clashed. There is nothing inevitable about it.

Having written Camp David as a drama, I could see the drama maybe a little more clearly when I wrote the book.

It's their belief, their own will, that holds people in Scientology, even oftentimes when they have been abused.

I guess I made a resolution years ago that I would only do things that were only really important or really fun.

Scientology is not a terrorist organization. Scientology has used intimidating tactics and vindictive litigation.

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny.

Journalism is a flawed profession, but it has a self-correcting mechanism. The rule of journalism is: talk to everybody.

I'm grateful for the ascendancy of women in business and politics, which may yet advance the humanity of those callings.

To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea - remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers.

I got my initiation into the Middle East in 1969 when I went there to teach at the American University in Cairo for two years.

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

I was in Austin on 9/11, and there were no flights, so I couldn't get to New York to cover the story, so I had to find more creative ways.

This age of terror will end one day, but whether our society can restore the feeling of freedom that once was our birthright is hard to predict.

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 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.

When you're first starting on a project, you feel shy because you don't know very much, and you know that you're going to be ignorant and seem ignorant.

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.

Certainly, the two things Scientology has on its side are money and lawyers, but those qualities won't save it if it can't find a way to bring new members into the fold.

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.

From the very beginning of this movement, Scientology has always been a very closeted organization. That aura of secrecy is something that the present-day management continues.

Share This Page