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
ideology publishing
Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.
average difference level low paranoid
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.
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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.
arteries begin carry recruit secondary
A heart beset by coronary disease will begin to recruit secondary arteries to carry oxygenated blood.
awful business corruption great japanese politics setting sort spy
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.
government involving somehow
When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.
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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.
blame others problems
Psychologically, it's always more pleasurable to blame others for our problems than it is to acknowledge our own responsibility.
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Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.
vehicle whether
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.
breaking few government interest knowledge lock methods select wants
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.
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I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.
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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.
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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.