Best 32 quotes of Barry Eisler on MyQuotes

After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.

Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.

From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'

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.

If the reader cares, I dont think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-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.

I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.

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.

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.

I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.

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.

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.

Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.

The City. Can't you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.

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.

The movie is someone else's art. But it's great marketing for books.

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.

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.

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.

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.

Caligula ne demişti? Oderint dum meduant. Bizden korktukları sürece, bırakın bizden nefret etsinler.

Do all the people who know me know me better than I know myself?

— E acabei por ir a casa dela para lhe configurar o sistema todo. — Harry, «configuraste-lhe o sistema todo»? — perguntei, arregalando os olhos e fingindo-me pasmado. Baixou o olhar, mas não conseguiu esconder um sorriso. — Tu percebeste. — Não vais... penetrar as seguranças dela, pois não? — perguntei, incapaz de resistir.

If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.

In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I'm rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I've survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS os some other unpleasant alternative.

Is there any teacher better, more patient, more determined than fate?

It's a strange thing, having a child," he said. It completely alters your most fundamental priorities. When my eldest daughter was born, I realized that I would do anything - anything - to protect her. If I had to set myself on fire to save her from something, I would do it with the utmost relief and gratitude. It's quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of worth of your own life is changed so much." Tatsu.

Most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep. But there’s a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn’t predation. It’s protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.

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.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.

You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.' Tatsu.