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
thinking office spy
From the outside, the CIA seems pretty exotic, but from the inside, it's a big bureaucratic place. Think 'post office with spies.'
ideology publishing
Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.
cities people ears
The City. Can't you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.
art gun thinking
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.
fall rain creative
After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement,
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.
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.
japan cities tokyo
I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.
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.
hero thinking care
If the reader cares, I dont think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.
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.
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.
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.
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.