Dan Brown Quotes

There's a lot of stress... but once you get in the car, all that goes out the window.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

I'm somebody who likes codes and ciphers and chases and artwork and architecture, and all the things you find in a Robert Langdon thriller.

- Dan Brown

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.'

- Dan Brown

I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.

- Dan Brown

I've always been captivated by the Voynich Manuscript - the mysterious, 15th-century encrypted codex that still baffles cryptologists, linguists, and historians.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

Well, you know, in any novel you would hope that the hero has someone to push back against, and villains - I find the most interesting villains those who do the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. Either one is interesting. I love the gray area between right and wrong.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

Two thousand years ago, we lived in a world of Gods and Goddesses. Today, we live in a world solely of Gods. Women in most cultures have been stripped of their spiritual power.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

I like mac and cheese.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

For me, a good thriller must teach me something about the real world. Thrillers like 'Coma,' 'The Hunt for Red October' and 'The Firm' all captivated me by providing glimpses into realms about which I knew very little - medical science, submarine technology and the law.

- Dan Brown

I'm trying to write books that taste like ice cream but have the nutrition of vegetables.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

I think one reason my books have found mainstream success is that they're written from a skeptical point of view.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

Christianity, Judaism and Islam all share a gospel, loosely, and it's important that we all realize that.

- Dan Brown

I'm not trying to emulate William Faulkner. I never said I was.

- Dan Brown

Our need for that exterior god that sits up there and judges us... will diminish and eventually disappear.

- Dan Brown

My interest in secret societies is the product of many experiences, some I can discuss, others I cannot.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.'

- Dan Brown

Art historians agree that Da Vinci's paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret... a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

- Dan Brown

I love the gray area between right and wrong.

- Dan Brown

I write seven days a week, starting at 4 o'clock in the morning, including Christmas.

- Dan Brown

I grew up in a very religious household. My mom was a church organist. I was a religious kid.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

- Dan Brown

Writing is a solitary journey, so I am always excited to go out on book tour and meet readers one-on-one.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.'

- Dan Brown

I've learned that universal acceptance and appreciation is just an unrealistic goal.

- Dan Brown

Nobody has ever convinced me that ancient aliens have visited Earth. Not even close.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

Suggesting a married Jesus is one thing, but questioning the Resurrection undermines the very heart of Christian belief.

- Dan Brown

I don't read horror, ever. When I was 15, I made the mistake of reading part of 'The Exorcist.' It was the first and last horror book I've ever opened.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

I personally believe that our planet would be absolutely fine without religion, and I also feel we are evolving in that direction.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

I spend my life essentially alone at a computer. That doesn't change. I have the same challenges every day.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

My sincere hope is that 'The Da Vinci Code,' in addition to entertaining people, will serve as an open door to begin their own explorations.

- Dan Brown

I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.

- Dan Brown

Technology is changing the way we interact as humans.

- Dan Brown

I learned early on not to listen to either critique - the people who love you or the people who don't like you.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

It's probably an intellectual weakness, but I look at the stars, and I say, 'There's something bigger than us out there.'

- Dan Brown

I consider myself a student of many religions. The more I learn, the more questions I have. For me, the spiritual quest will be a life-long work in progress.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

Futurists don't consider overpopulation one of the issues of the future. They consider it the issue of the future.

- Dan Brown

That is the definition of faith - acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

Our religions are much more similar than they are different.

- Dan Brown

She was deeply passionate about the sacred feminine.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

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.

- Dan Brown

It's not about what you tell the reader, it's about what you conceal.

- Dan Brown

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!'

- Dan Brown

I feel like if I'm going to take time reading, I better be learning.

- Dan Brown