Barry Eisler Quotes

21 quotes in 346 categories

• 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…
• I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.
• The movie is someone else's art. But it's great marketing for books.
• 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.'
• 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 City. Can't you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.
• Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.
• Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.
• The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.
• A heart beset by coronary disease will begin to recruit secondary arteries to carry oxygenated blood.
• Good argument is intended to persuade another.
• The most important guideline when it comes to argument is the golden rule. If someone were addressing your point, what tone, what overall approach would…

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