Cecil Beaton Quotations

More varied than any landscape was the landscape in the sky, with islands of gold and silver, peninsulas of apricot and rose against a background of many shades of turquoise and azure.

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.

Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.

All I want is the best of everything and there's very little of that left.

I have the worst ear for criticism, even when I have created a stage set I like, I always hear the woman in the back of the dress circle, who says she doesn't like blue.

Mrs Woolf's complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.

San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities

On close inspection, this device turned out to be a funereal juke box - the result of mixing Lloyd's of London with the principle of the chewing gum dispenser.

I can't afford a whole new set of enemies.

Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.

Miss Marilyn Monroe calls to mind the bouquet of a fireworks display, eliciting from her awed spectators an open-mouthed chorus of ohs and ahs ...

Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.

After twenty annual visits, I am still surprised each time I return to see this giant asparagus bed of alabaster and rose and green skyscrapers.

A technical failure that shows some attempt at aesthetic expression is of infinitely more value than uninspired success.

I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.

[He stared into the camera] like some sort of an animal gazing from across the back of its sty. (On Winston Churchill)

What is elegance? Soap and water!

The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.

You can't teach people photography, they've got to learn how to do it the best way possible for them. They can learn from looking at pictures taken by well-known people, but they don't really get intimate with the medium until they've made a few bad shots!

Love is someone you can be silly with

An old Polish frog... with a huge casket of jewels... and she clicks her teeth and shrugs, "Only Rubbish. Much more in Paris.

Oh, well, he couldn't do everything, could he?