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

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.

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.

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

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios… The idea that you can actually predict what’s going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

I stepped into the martial arts movie market when I was only 16. I think I have proved my ability in this field and it won’t make sense for me to continue for another five or 10 years.

The export market is based, on high-paying jobs. I`ve seen statistics that show that people make over 88 a year generally benefit from this because these are export jobs.

Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I’m going to continue fighting for the end user.

No matter how exceptional your product, you won’t benefit financially if you can’t sell it.

The financial markets play an active role in determining what’s going to happen, how the economy is going to function.

The average result has to be the average result. By definition, everybody can’t beat the market. As I always say, the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. That’s just the way it is.

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.