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

When I wrote my eighth thriller, Inside Out, in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

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

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.

I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.

The City. Can’t you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.

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

What a jolly thing military surveillance is!

When the New York Times revealed the warrantless surveillance of voice calls, in December 2005, the telephone companies got nervous.

You need a strategy that involves layered defense: deployed patrols, sophisticated sensor equipment, and surveillance from the air. That is what has had a positive impact over the last generation.

But when Americans lack the most basic information about our domestic surveillance programs, they have no way of knowing whether we’re getting that balance right. This lack of transparency is a big problem.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.