Cecil Beaton Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love is someone you can be silly with

What is elegance? Soap and water!

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

San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities

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

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.

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

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

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.