I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?

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.

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

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.

It was strange, I reflected.. that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one's life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.