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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

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

Business Ideology Publishing
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
The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isnt really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.
BARRY EISLER

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

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

Creative Fall Rain
I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.
BARRY EISLER

City Country Favorite Love
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 movie is someone else’s art. But it’s great marketing for books.
BARRY EISLER

Art Book Marketing
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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