Top 13 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Richardson

Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do - that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I want my photos to be fresh and urgent. A good photograph should be a call to arms.

I always say I make pictures rather than take pictures.

It's insane, the Internet. Totally craziness. Like a little cancer. People can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, be totally anonymous. It's totally out of control.

Over the course of my career, I have come to accept that some of my more provocative work courts controversy, and as an artist, I value the discourse that arises from this. I can only hope for this discourse to be informed by fact, so that whether you love my work or hate it, you give it, and me, the benefit of the truth.

I like using snapshot cameras because they're idiot-proof. I have bad eyesight, and I'm no good at focusing big cameras.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, and so many others before me, sexual imagery has always been a part of my photography.

I look fondly back on renegade days of my youth. Not the partying or anything, but it's still the spirit that I have always adhered to. When I do work that I like, it feels like a great punk song, like a burst of adrenaline. I've always kept this spirit in me, or some sort of connection to it.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I don't work off lights and angles; I work off emotions. A mood that I create.

It's not who you know, it's who you blow. I don't have a hole in my jeans for nothing.

At the beginning, people laughed at me because I was using snappies. Sometimes, a celebrity would look at my camera and go, Oh, I've got one of those. I'd feel like handing it to them and saying, Well, you take the pictures then. But I like using snapshot cameras because they're idiot-proof. I have bad eyesight, and I'm no good at focusing big cameras.

I didn't want to be a photographer. I wanted to play music and be a rock star. I didn't have a mentor telling me to take pictures and encouraging me. But when the music thing didn't work out, I became a photographer's assistant. And then I caught the bug.