“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.”

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

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

A fellow ought to save a few of the long evenings he spends with his girl till after they’re married.

The press of Italy is free, freer than the press of any other country, so long as it supports the regime.

So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service.

When a woman comes to her class, she does not employ her time in making herself look more advantageously what she really is, but endeavours to be as much another creature as she possibly can.

A hero can go anywhere, challenge anyone, as long as he has the nerve.

So long as there is one [person] who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of work are too long.

Part of the American dream is to live long and die young. Only those Americans who are willing to die for their country are fit to live.

The big tradition, I think, is unity. And I have that in mind; and with that, you know, you could break all the traditions- all the other so-called rules, because they are stylistic.. and most are not true.