Our religions are much more similar than they are different.
— Dan Brown
Writing is a solitary journey, so I am always excited to go out on book tour and meet readers one-on-one.
I've always been captivated by the Voynich Manuscript - the mysterious, 15th-century encrypted codex that still baffles cryptologists, linguists, and historians.
When I was a kid, the miracles of my life were the Resurrection, a candlelight service on New Year's Eve, the Virgin Birth, and the Three Wise Men.
I'm trying to write books that taste like ice cream but have the nutrition of vegetables.
The challenge for a writer looking at history is to figure out what is history and what is myth. After all, what you are looking at is an interpretation of history, and so at some level, it becomes an interpretation of an interpretation.
It's probably an intellectual weakness, but I look at the stars, and I say, 'There's something bigger than us out there.'
I'm not going to lie; the most fun of writing these books is just saying, 'Where am I going to write about? Let me go there!'
I grew up in a very religious household. My mom was a church organist. I was a religious kid.
I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.
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 will not write a lame follow-up. It could take me 20 years. But I will never turn in a book that I'm not happy with.
Futurists don't consider overpopulation one of the issues of the future. They consider it the issue of the future.
I learned early on not to listen to either critique - the people who love you or the people who don't like you.
The power that religion has is that you think nothing is random: If there's a tragedy in my life, that's God testing me or sending me a message.
I love the gray area between right and wrong.
I still get up every morning at 4 A.M. I write seven days a week, including Christmas. And I still face a blank page every morning, and my characters don't really care how many books I've sold.
Christianity, Judaism and Islam all share a gospel, loosely, and it's important that we all realize that.
Nobody has ever convinced me that ancient aliens have visited Earth. Not even close.
We have plenty of technologies we could use to destroy the planet, and we don't. There's more love on this planet than hate; there's more creativity than destructive power.
I like mac and cheese.
I personally believe that our planet would be absolutely fine without religion, and I also feel we are evolving in that direction.
I love to learn, and at some level, there's something to learn from my books. And I love art and philosophy, so there's something philosophical about my fiction.
I'm not a car person. Three years after 'The Da Vinci Code' came out, I still had my old, rusted Volvo. And people are like, 'Why don't you have a Maserati?' It never occurred to me. It wasn't a priority for me. I just didn't care.
Technology is changing the way we interact as humans.
I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping.
I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.
I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.
I write seven days a week, starting at 4 o'clock in the morning, including Christmas.
I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.
If a reviewer is beating me up, I just say, 'Oh well, my writing is not to his or her taste.' And that's as far as it goes. Because I will simultaneously read a review where somebody says, 'Oh my God, I had so much fun reading this book and I learned so much.'
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 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.
Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough.
Our need for that exterior god that sits up there and judges us... will diminish and eventually disappear.
I have great admiration for the fact-checking team. Considering it takes me years to gather all the facts in my books, it's a daunting task for the fact-checkers to review all of that material in a matter of weeks.
I spent some time in India and thought I might write about Hinduism. But it's so far removed from my experience I couldn't even get my mind around it to write about it.
I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.
When I wrote 'The Da Vinci Code,' I told myself that this story of Jesus makes more sense to me than the story I read in the Bible.
I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.
I feel like if I'm going to take time reading, I better be learning.
The thing that's going to make artificial intelligence so powerful is its ability to learn, and the way AI learns is to look at human culture.
It's not about what you tell the reader, it's about what you conceal.
I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'
Washington, D.C., has everything that Rome, Paris and London have in the way of great architecture - great power bases. Washington has obelisks and pyramids and underground tunnels and great art and a whole shadow world that we really don't see.
There is a statistic I heard a number of years ago: if you know somebody who is 85 years old, that person was born into a world that had a third as many people as the world does today. The population has tripled in the past 85 years.
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've learned that universal acceptance and appreciation is just an unrealistic goal.
It's funny, 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. I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.
Transhumanism is the ethics and science of using things like biological and genetic engineering to transform our bodies and make us a more powerful species.
