They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes or fisherman's octopus and shrimps fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.

I did grow up next door to Steve McQueen who was a very famous movie star at the time but as a kid it didn't impress me. We always had great fun with him. He would take us out on Sundays on his motorcycles riding around in the desert he was like a second father.

Men have looked upon the desert as barren land the free holding of whoever chose but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it against aggression.

Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores and in the redwood forests in the deserts and in the plains.

No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where like all desert dwellers they dream their buildings rather than design them.

Life is the desert life the solitude death joins us to the great majority.

I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada in a tiny town called Searchlight. My dad was a hard rock miner. My mom took in wash. I grew up around people of strong values - even if they rarely talked about them.

The cool parts - the parts that have won Dubai its reputation as 'the Vegas of the Middle East' or 'the Venice of the Middle East' or 'the Disney World of the Middle East if Disney World were the size of San Francisco and out in a desert' - have been built in the last ten years.

A friend of mine has a big farm in the desert and she picks up feathers and roadkill for me then makes it into clothes. I think it's cool to wear roadkill. If I died and somebody wanted to wear my teeth around their neck to VMAs I'd feel honored.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.