Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes people damage paintings or sculpture because they love it. They throw their arms around a statue in a fit of hysterical passion and it falls over.

Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.

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.