Barry Eisler
The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.Collection: Knowledge
Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.Collection: Humor
Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.Collection: Anger
The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.Collection: Communication
If you focus on the risks, they'll multiply in your mind and eventually paralyze you. You want to focus on the task, instead, on doing what needs to be done.Collection: Focus
I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.Collection: Earth
The two most important things to do for self-defense are not to take a martial arts class or get a gun, but to think like the opposition and know where you're most at risk.Collection: Art
I make a good living selling hardback books through paper publishers and I have many friends in the industry who will suffer as it changes, so on a personal level the transition to digital isn't something I welcome wholeheartedly.Collection: Book
The job of the screenplay is to identify and extract the essence of the story from the novel and reconfigure it for the screen, maintaining its essence in a different vehicle.Collection: Jobs
I can understand the allure of a venerable Big Six imprint, of a shot at the New York Times list, of a publisher-sponsored book tour, of seeing your hardbacks in bookstores and your paperbacks in supermarkets.Collection: New York
I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.Collection: Japan
The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.Collection: Office
If the reader cares, I dont think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.Collection: Hero
I have a long-standing interest in what I like to think of as "forbidden knowledge": methods of unarmed killing, lock picking, breaking and entry, spy stuff, and other things that the government wants only a few select individuals to know.Collection: Thinking
It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.Collection: Thinking
Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.Collection: Book
The movie is someone else's art. But it's great marketing for books.Collection: Art
After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.Collection: Rain
From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'Collection: Thinking
The City. Can't you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.Collection: Cities
Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.Collection: Ideology
When I wrote my eighth thriller, Inside Out, in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.Collection: War
The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isnt really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.Collection: Quality
Paper publishers are doing everything they can to slow the transition to eBooks because, in a digital world, paper publishers' high hardback margins essentially disappear.Collection: Transition