True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune to keep him is a blessing.

As a 22-year Army Veteran who served in Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom and as a Civilian Advisor to the Afghan Army in Operation Enduring Freedom I understand both the gravity of giving the order and the challenge of carrying it out.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts patriotism idealism a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base something guarded not merely from attack but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts the desert or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.

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.

I lived in small town out in the desert and my friend used to steal his mom's car in the middle of the night. He'd drive over to my house I'd sneak out and we'd go out to the desert and just burn things down.

I like the desert for short periods of time from inside a car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.

If you don't die of thirst there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness which we all yearn for or you can do the beauty of minutiae the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music or Neil Young.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night and feel them. But do I see less or more?

I'm so happy to have been a part of that process and I would go straight back into the desert in a ton of chain mail for Ridley any day of the week. He's an amazing director and I can't wait to see the long version.

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.