“If you ask three people what it means to be Christian, you will get three different answers. Some feel being baptized is sufficient. Others feel you must accept the Bible as immutable historical fact. Still others require a belief that all those who do not accept Christ as their personal savior are doomed to hell.”
“We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.'”
“I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.”
“I read nonfiction almost exclusively - both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it's almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.”
“I think I was a shy kid. I grew up without television. I had a dog, and we lived up in the White Mountains in the summer, and I had no friends up there. And I would just go play hide-and-seek with my dog and probably had some imaginary friends.”
“I was already writing 'The Lost Symbol' when I started to realize 'The Da Vinci Code' would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware.”
“I'm fascinated by power, especially veiled power. Shadow power. The National Security Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office. Opus Dei. The idea that everything happens for reasons we're not quite seeing.”
“If you believe the people who love you, you get lazy. And if you believe the people who hate you, you become... maybe intimidated, or whatever the word might be, and you don't write as well.”
“I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. And I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.”
“It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.”