The lions taught me photography. They taught me patience and the sense of beauty, a beauty that penetrates you.

The Queen is frequently on her own, walking the dogs, riding her horses, playing patience, completing a jigsaw, sorting her photograph albums, watching television, phoning friends, doing the Telegraph crossword. Is she neglected? Is she suffering? Or does she simply understand her man?

Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.

Photoshop makes things look beautiful just as you have special effects in movies. It's just a part of life.

I'll take photographs with kids. People who want to take photographs with me. People who like the movies. People who supported me. I'll do that all day, all night, that's fine. But the bombardment of the paparazzi is just... I truly don't understand. It just feels like this kind of gluttonous, horrific sport. It's like sport.

I've always painted or drawn pictures or taken still photographs; now I shoot movies. It's just about making images, really.

Before I start, I search the internet for hours looking for inspiration - I look at horror movies, special effects, everything. Then, I take a bunch of screenshots, and pile them together in Photoshop to create a story for myself. I plan it out in my head, but I don't ever practice beforehand.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.

There is a one woman in China that claimed she paid $50 to get my e-mail address. It was pretty shocking. I got one this morning from Scotland. A girl's requesting a signed photo of me.

I remember my first 'Sports Illustrated' shoot was with the photographer Walter Iooss, and Julie Campbell was the editor, and we were at the president of Mexico's private house in Cancun - this was before anything else that's now in Cancun even existed. And they told me to get a tan, so I spent all morning in the sun, and I was burnt.

I looked at the photos at the VMAs and my hair was the most. That was a time when we were the most extreme - like, I totally looked like Cher. And it always took, like, two bottles of hairspray every morning. Yeah, we've definitely changed a lot. But I love that we have that history, and I enjoy looking back.

My mom and I don't have a lot of photos of my early years.

My mom's an artist in every way. She's a painter, a photographer. She's a wanderer - always searching, always seeing. I guess you could say my mom gave me her eyes.

My mom was a medical photographer, but on the side, she did a before-and-after glam photography business in the house. She would do makeup and hair - and I was her assistant.

After art college, I got a job as a medical illustrator, and I was pretty good. I had to imagine what was going on in the operations because the photographs just showed a mess.

We knew that if the photos of CIA officers conducting authorized EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques) ever got out, the difference between a legal, authorized, necessary, and safe program and the mindless actions of some MPs (military police) would be buried by the impact of the images.

If anybody wanted to photograph my life, they'd get bored in a day. 'Heres Matt at home learning his lines. Here's Matt researching in aisle six of his local library'. A few hours of that and they'd go home.

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.

To be an Instagram model, you absolutely cannot just post pictures of yourself in a bikini for the sake of people seeing you in a bikini - even if that is exactly what you are doing. No, you need to caption these photos with an inspirational quote so that people will know that you are not just a butt, you're a gosh dang philosopher.

Nothing speaks louder than an evocative photograph that stirs the imagination, tugs at the heart strings and engages the mind.

I still have a photo on my wall of the greatest idol I will ever have in my life, and it's myself at eight. Because that's when the forces of imagination have the same value as the real world, when they're an instrument of survival: when my mother disappeared, and I imagined a mother. That was me at my best.

I like photographs which leave something to the imagination.

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.