1) MICHAEL BAIGENT
2) RICHARD LEIGH
Claimants
THE RANDOM HOUSE GROUP LIMITED
Defendant
FIRST WITNESS STATEMENT OF DAN BROWN

I, DAN BROWN, care of Random House, Inc., 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019, United States of America, WILL SAY as follows:-

I. I am the author of four novels, Digital Fortress (1998), Angels & Demons (2000), Deception Point (2001), and The DaVinci Code (2003). In this statement I make reference to all four of my books, and I assume that the reader has some familiarity with my books but, in particular, has read The Da Vinci Code.

2. I live and work in the United States. I am a graduate of Amherst College and of Phillips Exeter Academy, where I also spent time as an English teacher before turning to writing full time.

Introduction

3. My father is a teacher emeritus at Phillips Exeter Academy and also has published more than a dozen well-known academic texts used around the world. He received the Presidential Award for excellence in mathematics teaching. Both of my parents are musicians, and both have served as church choir masters. My mother has a master's degree in sacred music and was a professional church organist. My father sings and was an actor in musical theatre. To this day, both continue to sing and are members of a Symphony Chorus that will be touring Europe this summer. This love of music, like many things my parents loved, was inherited by me. When I was at Amherst I was very interested in music composition and creative writing. I also loved languages.

4. I grew up on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy, where my father was a teacher. By chance, the school has a very strong tradition of writing and has a number of famous writers as alumni, including John Irving, Gore Vidal, Daniel Webster, and Peter Benchley. It is also known for the strictness of its regulations and code of conduct, especially with respect to plagiarism. I notice from the school's website that plagiarism is still considered a "major offence", exactly as it was in my day.

5. While at Phillips Exeter and Amherst College, I pursued advanced writing courses and was published in school literary magazines. At Exeter, I chose "creative writing" as my senior project. At Amherst, I applied for and was accepted to a special writing course with visiting novelist Alan Lelchuk.

6. I studied English and Spanish at school. During my high school summers, I travelled to Spain on two exchange programs and fell in love with the country. In 1985, while I was still a student at Amherst College, I spent the school year abroad in Seville, Spain, where I enrolled in a two semester art history course at University of Sevil1e. This art course covered the entire history of World Art- from the Egyptians to Jackson Pollock. The professor's slide presentations included images ranging from the pyramids, religious icons, renaissance painting and sculpture, all the way through to the pop artists of modem times.

7. This course opened my eyes to the concept of art as "communication" between artist and viewer. The artist's language, I learned, was often symbolism and metaphor, and the professor's revelation of the hidden meanings of the violent images in Picasso's "La Guemica" has stayed with me to this day, as has his passion for the absolute pain of Michelangelo's Pieta. The course covered many other works that resonated with me as a young man, including the horror of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son and the bizarre anamorphic sexual nightmares of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. I was surprised by the unexpected "dark quality" of Leonardo daVinci's The Last Supper. I remember the professor pointing out things I hadn't seen before, including a disembodied hand clutching a dagger and a disciple making a threatening gesture across the throat of another.

8. The course was a chronology of art history, and I took a specific interest in the renaissance masters of Bernini, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci.

9. Both the art course and the country itself had a great influence on my writing. In fact, I was so taken with the architecture of Seville that, ten years later, when I wrote my first novel (Digital Fortress), I set much of the action in Seville. There are scenes in the Cathedral of Seville, atop the Moorish tower La Giralda, the ancient alleyways of Barrio Santa Cruz, Parque Maria Luisa, and the Alfonso XIII. I was taught early on at Phillips Exeter that "one must write what one knows". Like many aspects of my life, scenes from my childhood, my relationship with my parents and family, my student years, and my time in Spain all later emerged in my books.

10. I took piano lessons since the age of six and wrote music throughout high school and college. Once I had finished college in May of1986, I focused my creative energies on song writing. I left home and moved to Los Angeles, the heart of the song writing industry, where I had limited success in music and paid my rent by working as an English teacher at Beverly Hills Prep School. Over the course of the ten years after college, I wrote and produced four albums of original music. I met my wife, Blythe, through the National Academy of Songwriters, where she was the Director of Artist Development. Blythe, like me, loved art. She also was a very talented painter. Despite the Academy's best efforts to promote me, my music career never really took off.

11. In 1993, Blythe and I vacationed together to Tahiti. I remember reading a book called The Doomsday Conspiracy, by Sidney Sheldon. Up until this point, almost all of my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.), and I'd read almost no commercial fiction at all since The Hardy Boys as a child. The Sheldon book was unlike anything I'd read as an adult. It held my attention, kept me turning pages, and reminded me how much fun it could be to read. The simplicity of the prose and efficiency of the storyline was less cumbersome than the dense novels of my schooldays, and I began to suspect that maybe I could write a "thriller" of this type one day. This inkling, combined with my musical frustrations at that time, planted the seed that perhaps I could write books for a living.

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