If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it! - Werner Herzog

My heroes have a lot in common. Fabius Maximus, who is mocked to this day as a cunctator, or delayer, but who saved Rome from Hannibal's Carthaginian army; Hercules Seghers, a painter of the early Rembrandt era who was barely noticed but is considered the father of modernity and made paintings of a kind that would not be seen for several centuries. Or Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, who composed music fully three hundred years ahead of its time — I'm thinking here principally of his sixth book of madrigals — not until Stravinsky, who went on pilgrimages to Gesualdo's castle, did we hear such sounds again. Also included is Pharaoh Akhenaton, who introduced an early form of monotheism half a millennium before Moses.

We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me.