I read Gide's 'The Immoralist' over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It's written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained.
My biggest hobby is airsoft, which is similar to paintball. Essentially, it's military simulation, but the guns shoot plastic BBs. My friends and I go out in the woods or the desert and play all day long!
For 'Avengers,' in the Albuquerque desert, we shot New York there. And I was standing on a platform, nine feet high... and it was the rooftop of a skyscraper in New York. And it was all desert around me!
If you cut down the forest, you know what happens: The whole of Asia turns into a desert. Without water, you're talking civil unrest, war, mud slides - the whole bloody lot.
Somali is turning into a desert. Rwanda, you can hardly find a place to plant a potato, it's so crowded.
I keep thinking I'm going to miss it back in Los Angeles. But I don't. The only thing I miss is driving out in the desert in the Southwest.
The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have left him of his desert.
Yucca Mountain isn't pretty. And it also isn't large. From far away, the mountain's just a squat bulge in the middle of the desert, essentially just debris from a bigger, stronger mountain that erupted millions of years ago and hurled its broken pieces into piles across the earth.
I find Suez astonishing for the first hour. It is a ditch in a desert, but a stunning one. The sensation of being hemmed in by huge ships, moving at a stately pace through a man-made waterway, is extraordinary.
Apollo 11 was the movie premiere of moon landings, with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Neil was a bit of a mystic, but also a taciturn guy from what I can tell. He really saw the moon as looking like the American high desert. He wasn't someone who dealt in metaphors.
I never tire of the drive from Phoenix to San Diego, and it is mostly desert, obviously, but you get different varieties of desert terrain.
The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans.
The California tract houses are like the mundane meeting the mystical. Sometimes if you're driving at twilight, and you see those houses, and they're starting to light up, there's something so beautiful, so ethereal about the fact that they're all pretty similar, set against this desert landscape and the light just hitting them a certain way.
The Botanischer Garten in Berlin has one of Europe's finer winter trails, leading in careful order from glasshouses devoted to African-American and Australian desert species, through a fine collection of tropical plants, and on to the orchid house.
The dependencies of inner and outer Mongolia are the bulwarks of China. The desert of Gobi, stretching for ten thousand li, is a barrier set by Heaven to the Russians, and if they seek to invade our borders, they will find it everywhere along the Northern frontier difficult and troublesome.
Often undecided whether to desert a sinking ship for one that might not float, he would make up his mind to sit on the wharf for a day.
Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.
In the heart of the desert and founded by the first Spanish Conquistadores, Las Vegas has become the entertainment capital of the world, with more than 30 million visitors a year.
Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or 'the people,' constitute the great majority of those affected.
Every time I come, I'm still amazed at the breadth California has. Big Sur, Yosemite, the desert... I love it.