Barry Eisler Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.