[H]ere is the one thing I would say for people approaching and getting ready for retirement. Three words: Avoid the bitter.Bitter will kill you. The artists of the 20th century I most respect would be Ernest Hemingway, John Ford and John Wayne. In many ways, the same men. Alpha males. Extremely, mythically successful with enormous sexual opportunities, enormous financial resources, able to indulge their every impulse, and yet all three of them ended up isolated, bitter and angry. That seems so tragic me.

I hated it [The Last Samurai (2003)] as well, because it put the little white guy at the center of a Japanese story, and he proved to be smarter, faster and tougher than anyone. In one sense, "The 47th Samurai" is a rebuke to that movie and to the "White Samurai" genre, where that generally happens as well; I made certain that my hero didn't become a better sword fighter than the Japanese, but only a passing adequate one, with definite limits on his skills. His only chance lay in figuring out ways to cheat rather than any innate superiority and he knew that he was doomed against a first-class swordsman.

On the latest Bob Lee Swagger novel: "... The new book is a result of my well-documented... absorption in Samurai movie culture. It's called 'The 47th Samurai: A Bob Lee Swagger novel,' and it takes Bob to Japan in search of the sword his father recovered on Iwo that has gone missing under extremely violent circumstances. He finds himself matched against some totally bad but cool Yakuza killers and the action jumps all over Tokyo. It ends with what I had hoped to be (you guys will have to tell me if I brought it off) the coolest, most realistic one-on-one to the death sword fight in print."