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Barry Eisler [1964-0] American

Rank: 102
Novelist

Barry Mark Eisler is a best-selling American novelist. He is the author of two thriller series, the first featuring anti-hero John Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American former soldier turned freelance assassin, and a second featuring black ops soldier Ben Treven.

Knowledge, Anger, Communication, Humor, Poetry, Politics

Quote	Tags	Rank
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.		101
I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.		102
The difference between being a victim and a survivor is often a low level of situational awareness. You can't be a super-spy, watchful and paranoid every day. But I am more watchful than the average American.		103
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.		104
When I was in college, I became interested in various aspects of foreign policy and international relations. Even as a kid, I was interested in what I call, loosely speaking, forbidden knowledge.	Knowledge	105
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.	Knowledge	106
I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.	Poetry	107
A heart beset by coronary disease will begin to recruit secondary arteries to carry oxygenated blood.		108
There's an awful lot of corruption in Japanese business and politics, corruption of the sort that can make for great setting for a spy story.	Politics	109
When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.		110
The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isn't really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.		111
Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.	Anger	112
I want to position my books as premium-priced versions on the reasonably-priced scale, if that makes sense, to find a sweet spot between the high-end of what my brand can support and the low end that results in impulse purchases and maximum sales volume.		113
Publishing, legacy or indie, is a vehicle, and you can't opine about whether someone has chosen the right vehicle if you don't know where she intends to drive it.		114
Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.	Humor	115
The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.	Communication	116
Psychologically, it's always more pleasurable to blame others for our problems than it is to acknowledge our own responsibility.		117
I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.		118
Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.		119
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.		120
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.		121
The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.		122
The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.		123
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.		124
I was with the CIA for only three years. I worked in the Directorate of Operations, which is now called the National Clandestine Service. It's the part of the organization where the spies live. I didn't have much experience beyond the training.		125
I've loved thrillers and spy stories since I was a kid. It's probably not a bad rule of thumb to write the kinds of stories you love to read.		126
What I care about is readers because without readers I can't make a living... And I think it's a bad thing for the world if people don't read anymore. I want people to read a lot.		201
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.		202
If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.		203
From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'		204
After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.		205
Books are my art. The movie is someone else's art. But it's great marketing for books.		206
Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.		207
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.		208
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.		209
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.		210
Good argument is intended to persuade another.		211
The most important guideline when it comes to argument is the golden rule. If someone were addressing your point, what tone, what overall approach would you find persuasive and want her to use? Whatever that is, do it yourself.		212
At the national level, I don't know how to describe a threat to destroy Country A in order to punish Country B other than to call it state terrorism.		213
I love Jet Li, but he looks very Chinese, and his English is Chinese-accented. He wouldn't have been the right guy to play a Japanese-American.		214

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