Quotes by Lawrence Wright

“We made a pretty good run until this game came around. I think the NCAA, they just see whos playing the best at the end of the season. I think with 20 wins we should be able to make it in.”

“I think this is a great thing for the conference. Weve got two teams in the Sweet 16. They cant say were overrated now, or that we got too many teams in the tournament.”

“They cant say we are overrated. Our teams have been successful. We are one of the best conferences in the nation.”

“This is great for the Missouri Valley Conference. To have two teams in the Sweet 16, you cant say were overrated or had too many bids. Just look at our success in the NIT and NCAA Tournament.”

I read a lot of books. Here are the books Im 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.

VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.

The Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament.

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about meaning and destiny. Inventing plausible new realities is what the genre is all about. One starts from a hypothesis and then builds out the logic, adding detail and incident to give substance to imaginary structures. In that respect, science fiction and theology have much in common.

The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be off-loaded to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.