Top 60 Barry Eisler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Some people just need killing.”

— Barry Eisler

2. “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”

— Barry Eisler

3. “I love Japan, and Tokyo is my favorite city.”

— Barry Eisler

4. “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light; I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

— Barry Eisler

5. “I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.”

— Barry Eisler

6. “Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life. – last words of Ota Dokan, scholar of military arts and poet, 1486.”

— Barry Eisler

7. “Medicine isn’t supposed to taste good – that’s what candy is for. Medicine is supposed to make you better.”

— Barry Eisler

8. “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

9. “The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty to his master, to a cause greater than himself.”

— Barry Eisler

10. “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

11. “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.”

— Barry Eisler

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that.” He.”

— Barry Eisler

16. “Prepping people to believe something was the hard part. Once the framework was established, they became eager to fill in the details themselves, and could be counted on to do so even if those details made little sense. Remar.”

— Barry Eisler

17. “In my unfortunately infrequent encounters with real passion, I’m rarely as careful as I ought to be. The rationalization goes something like: With all the bullets and mortar rounds I’ve survived, I must be immune to sexually transmitted diseases. Stupid, I know. More likely, fate will indulge its taste for irony by killing me with AIDS os some other unpleasant alternative.”

— Barry Eisler

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “Only teasing’, Death seemed to be saying over his shoulder with a rictus smile, with good humor and an oddly paternal affection. ‘Take care of yourself, okay? We’ll play again.”

— Barry Eisler

22. “You forget the things you want to remember and remember the things you want to forget.”

— Barry Eisler

23. “It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you – and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages.”

— Barry Eisler

24. “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

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

— Barry Eisler

26. “Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind’s equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They’ll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.”

— Barry Eisler

27. “If you wanted to understand the mentality of most Washington insiders, all you had to do was put yourself in the mind of an insecure teenager, at which point it all began to make sense.”

— Barry Eisler

28. “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, theres something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.”

— Barry Eisler

29. “The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.”

— Barry Eisler

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

— Barry Eisler

31. “Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour. The.”

— Barry Eisler

32. “He was blushing. Christ, the kid was so transparent. “Harry, are you going to tell me you’ve got a girlfriend?” I asked. The blush deepened, and I laughed. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Good for you.” He looked at me, checking to see whether I was going to tease him. “She’s not exactly my girlfriend.” “Well, never mind the taxonomy. How did you meet her?” “Work.”

— Barry Eisler

33. “Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you’re alone in the house, to ensure an intruder isn’t hiding there? Now, if you really believed the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But it’s more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only halfheartedly. That’s denial.”

— Barry Eisler

34. “Checking your six?” he said, still smiling. “I thought you wanted an airport because they’re safe. What is it about me that scares people so much?”

— Barry Eisler

35. “First was the fewer, not less. Now it was the care in avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence. An educated man, presumably. Precise. Apparently fussy about small-minded rules, perhaps to compensate for a willingness to ignore large ones.”

— Barry Eisler

36. “If I have to err, it’s on the side of assuming the worst. This way, if I’m wrong, I can always apologize. Or send flowers. You err on the other side, the flowers will be coming to you.”

— Barry Eisler

37. “I looked out at the street beyond the overhang. The rain was coming in at gray angled streaks. One of my hands moved to her cheek. I closed my eyes. Her skin was wet from the rain and I thought of tears.”

— Barry Eisler

38. “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

39. “And I resented you for that,” she went on, “because I’ve always believed hate is such an unworthy emotion. So weak and ultimately pointless.” I marveled briefly at how innocent a life someone would have to have led for such a philosophy to emerge credible and intact, and for a second I loved her for it.”

— Barry Eisler

40. “I paused before the door and used the SoldierVision to confirm the hallway was clear before opening it.”

— Barry Eisler

41. “Do all the people who know me know me better than I know myself?”

— Barry Eisler

42. “The insult was calculated. Whether this guy was an amateur or a professional, he would perceive himself as the latter, and would now be invested in proving it to me. Interrogators call the technique ego down.”

— Barry Eisler

43. “Tatsu was true samurai, and would continue serving the same master no matter how many times that master ignored or even abused him. Devoted service was the highest end he knew. It.”

— Barry Eisler

44. “She remembered something her mother had told her when she was a teenager: “The boy you date is different from the boy you’re engaged to, the boy you’re engaged to is different from the man you marry, the man you marry is different from the father of your children.” She might have added, “And your ex-husband is going to be different than all of them, too.”

— Barry Eisler

45. “Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.”

— Barry Eisler

46. “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

47. “In the twenty-first century, people threw off data like dead skin cells.”

— Barry Eisler

48. “I have no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane.”

— Barry Eisler

49. “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 isnt something I welcome wholeheartedly.”

— Barry Eisler

50. “Now death was a place, a place to which people disappeared forever when they died, a place that gradually sucked away the clarity of memory afterward for a similar one-way journey.”

— Barry Eisler