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

Barry Eisler

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.
BARRY EISLER

Paper Transition World
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.
BARRY EISLER

Government Long Thinking
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.
BARRY EISLER

Focus Mind Risk
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.
BARRY EISLER

Book Suffering Transition
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.
BARRY EISLER

Art Gun Thinking
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.
BARRY EISLER

Different Essence Jobs
The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.
BARRY EISLER

Achieve Office Wish
Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.
BARRY EISLER

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

Office Spy Thinking
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.
BARRY EISLER

Allure Country Imprint Shot Understand
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.
BARRY EISLER

Government Group War
The National Surveillance State doesn’t want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.
BARRY EISLER

Authority Communication State Surveillance
Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.
BARRY EISLER

Causes Responsibility Self
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.
BARRY EISLER

Declaiming Impressive People Thinking
I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.
BARRY EISLER

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

Cities Machines People

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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