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In that long sequence, when Lawrence enters in the desert to rescue a lost man, Lean listened the music I wrote and wanted to extend the scene to let my work stay completely.

T. E. Lawrence was far more than a glamorous, swashbuckling, heroic figure in flowing robes mounted on a camel, leading the Arab tribes against the Turks in World War One.

You couldn't have done this without killing an Arab prince.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

The defense of the West Bank by Arab forces would be a truly suicidal enterprise. The late King Hussein understood these facts well. Until 1967, he was careful to keep most of his forces east of the Jordan River. When he momentarily forgot these realities in 1967, it took Israel just three days of fighting to remind him of them.

Lawrence of Arabia is the ultimate movie, deeply cinematic.

'Lawrence of Arabia' is a film that anyone wanting to become an actor should watch at least six hundred times.

There's enough of a willingness in the West to do sympathetic movies about Arab roles.

I mean, it was a mummy movie. It was a good film independent of its source. It that looks like Lawrence of Arabia on steroids in a lot of ways.

The world is lousy with Arab princes. And if we could have got Osama bin Laden, and saved at some point down the road 3,000 American lives, a few less Arab princes would have been OK in my book.