Barry Eisler
Barry Eisler
Barry Mark Eisleris 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. Eisler also writes about politics and language on his blog Heart of the Matter, and at the blogs CHUD, Firedoglake, The Huffington Post, MichaelMoore.com, The Smirking Chimp, and Truthout...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
cia seems
From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big, bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'
focus risk mind
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.
jobs essence stories
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.
thinking people would-be
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, theres something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.
thinking government long
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.
book suffering transition
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 isnt something I welcome wholeheartedly.
hero thinking care
If the reader cares, I dont think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.
responsibility self causes
Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.
japan cities tokyo
I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.
new-york book lists
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.
office wish achieve
The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.
book writing self
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.
world paper digital
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.
earth daring kill-me
I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.