Top 74 Barry Eisler Quotes
#1. I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.
Barry Eisler
#2. 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.
Barry Eisler
#3. I thought of an old poker players' expression: If you look around the table and can't spot the sucker, the sucker is you.
Barry Eisler
#4. 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.
Barry Eisler
#5. 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.
Barry Eisler
#6. 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.
Barry Eisler
#7. Only teasing', Death seemed to be saying over his shoulder with a rictus smile, with good humor and an oddly paternal affection. 'Take care of yourself, okay? We'll play again.
Barry Eisler
#8. 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.
Barry Eisler
#9. 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.
Barry Eisler
#10. It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America's oil addiction is a sickness that's killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work.
Barry Eisler
#11. 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.
Barry Eisler
#12. Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;
Barry Eisler
#13. Books are my art. The movie is someone else's art. But it's great marketing for books.
Barry Eisler
#14. 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.
Barry Eisler
#15. If you knew at the outset what you understood at the end, would you make the same choices, take the same risks, accept the same sacrifices? No. No one would. You can't appreciate the weight of that burden until after you've assumed it. You can't comprehend what it really means.
Barry Eisler
#16. 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.
Barry Eisler
#17. 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.
Barry Eisler
#18. But it's like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air.
Barry Eisler
#19. Then she reached lower and started to ease my pants down. I stopped her so I could get my shoes and socks off first. Pants-pooled-at-the-ankles is too helpless a posture for me.
Barry Eisler
#20. 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.
Barry Eisler
#21. 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.
Barry Eisler
#22. 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.
Barry Eisler
#23. no matter the pain or shock or confusion, never stop moving. Never give them a stationary target.
Barry Eisler
#24. Shoganai," I said. Literally, There is no way of doing it. "Yes," he said, nodding. "Elsewhere they have Cest la vie, or That's life.
Barry Eisler
#25. 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.
Barry Eisler
#26. 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.
Barry Eisler
#27. Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour. The
Barry Eisler
#28. He glanced to his left, which for most people is a neurolinguistic sign of recall rather than of construction. Had he looked in the opposite direction, I would have read it as a lie.
Barry Eisler
#29. A mole could only avoid and evade the monitoring systems of which he was aware. Which made it crucial that almost no one be permitted to see the whole picture. Within
Barry Eisler
#30. What I was doing, I was sabotaging myself. Well, it was time I stopped.
Barry Eisler
#31. 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.
Barry Eisler
#32. 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.
Barry Eisler
#33. Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.
Barry Eisler
#34. 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.
Barry Eisler
#35. 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.
Barry Eisler
#36. Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.
Barry Eisler
#37. would show that inside twenty-one feet against a knife, trying to get a gun out is typically a losing bet, especially if you're backing straight up rather than getting off the line.
Barry Eisler
#38. 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.
Barry Eisler
#39. After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.
Barry Eisler
#40. The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty to his master, to a cause greater than himself.
Barry Eisler
#41. 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.
Barry Eisler
#42. 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.
Barry Eisler
#43. A survivor reassesses odds continually and doesn't disrespect them.
Barry Eisler
#44. You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.'
Tatsu.
Barry Eisler
#45. War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that." He
Barry Eisler
#46. The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.
Barry Eisler
#47. A heart beset by coronary disease will begin to recruit secondary arteries to carry oxygenated blood.
Barry Eisler
#48. If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.
Barry Eisler
#49. 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.
Barry Eisler
#50. I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.
Barry Eisler
#51. 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.
Barry Eisler
#52. I sighed. Two goodbyes in one night. It was depressing. And it wasn't as though I had a whole Rolodex full of friends. But no sense being sentimental about it. Sentiment is stupid.
Barry Eisler
#53. If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.
Barry Eisler
#54. You start slow. You find the subject's limits and get him to spend some time there. He gets used to it. Before long, the limits have moved. You never take him more than a centimeter beyond. You make it feel it's his choice.
Barry Eisler
#55. ...savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands...
Barry Eisler
#56. The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.
Barry Eisler
#57. It seemed he'd recently learned the value of playing up the difficulty of accomplishing whatever he was tasked with, the better to play the hero when he subsequently pulled it off. He was overusing the technique the way a child overuses a new word.
Barry Eisler
#58. 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.
Barry Eisler
#59. Psychologically, it's always more pleasurable to blame others for our problems than it is to acknowledge our own responsibility.
Barry Eisler
#60. I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.
Barry Eisler
#61. Prepping people to believe something was the hard part. Once the framework was established, they became eager to fill in the details themselves, and could be counted on to do so even if those details made little sense. Remar
Barry Eisler
#62. I've gotten used to hoping for so little that I seem to have lost any natural immunity to the emotion's infection.
Barry Eisler
#63. 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.
Barry Eisler
#64. Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.
Barry Eisler
#65. When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.
Barry Eisler
#66. If you want to create opportunities, you have to create movement.
Barry Eisler
#67. I looked out at the street beyond the overhang. The rain was coming in at gray angled streaks. One of my hands moved to her cheek. I closed my eyes. Her skin was wet from the rain and I thought of tears.
Barry Eisler
#68. People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group. But
Barry Eisler
#69. Good argument is intended to persuade another.
Barry Eisler
#70. A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
Barry Eisler
#71. The City. Can't you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.
Barry Eisler
#73. From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'
Barry Eisler
#74. Tatsu was true samurai, and would continue serving the same master no matter how many times that master ignored or even abused him. Devoted service was the highest end he knew. It
Barry Eisler
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