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.
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.
I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.
There's an awful lot of corruption in Japanese business and politics, corruption of the sort that can make for great setting for a spy story.
I'm not sure why I'm so drawn to heroes who do bad things and to villains who think they're the good guys, but I do find that moral ambiguity and conflict makes for great characters.
When I think of a story, somehow it just always seems to come out involving spooks and spies and government skullduggery.
After I sold my screenplay adaptation of 'Rain Fall' to Sony Pictures, I had no more creative involvement.
Action fiction is driven more by what than by who. Put that ticking nuclear suitcase under Manhattan, and it's relatively easy to create suspense. Literary fiction is driven more by who than by what.
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.
The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.
A heart beset by coronary disease will begin to recruit secondary arteries to carry oxygenated blood.
The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isn't really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.
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.
At the national level, I don't know how to describe a threat to destroy Country A in order to punish Country B other than to call it state terrorism.
Psychologically, it's always more pleasurable to blame others for our problems than it is to acknowledge our own responsibility.
Anger, and the self-righteousness that is both the cause and consequence of anger, tends to be easier on the psyche than personal responsibility.
The difference between being a victim and a survivor is often a low level of situational awareness. You can't be a super-spy, watchful and paranoid every day. But I am more watchful than the average American.
The post office actually achieves its mission. I wish we could say the same of the CIA.
The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.
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.
