The kinds of landscape I try to find in my films...exist only in our dreams. For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a fo… - Werner Herzog

It's hard to explain the point of dead languages to people today. Latin, in a pinch, but only for lawyers, theologians, and historians. In purely practical terms, these languages are useless. But their study gave us a profounder understanding of the origins of Western culture, of literature, of philosophy, of the deepest currents of our understanding of the world we live in.

A few years ago, we had a family reunion on the coast of Spain, where my brother was living at the time. At his invitation and expense, we had a wonderful evening at a fish restaurant. My brother, sitting beside me, put his arm around me as I studied the menu. Something began to smoke; I felt a light prick at my back, and suddenly I realized that with his cigarette lighter he had set my shirt on fire. I tore it off, and everyone was aghast, but the pair of us laughed loudly at the joke that didn't seem funny to anyone else. Someone lent me a T-shirt for the rest of the evening, and the little sore patch of skin on my back was cooled with a splash of prosecco.

It is only through writing that I become myself