I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.

My guess is that he remembers some of me, some of us together, and the rest rolled off him like topsoil in a flash flood.

Today I will go to wait for her again, because I cannot help it, because my whole being seems now to be bound up in the being of one so different from myself and yet so exquisitely familiar that I can scarely understand what has happened.

When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know.

I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present rather than an escape from it.

No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.