Cecil Beaton quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.

  • San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities

  • Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.

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

  • 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 ...

  • What is elegance? Soap and water!

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.

  • 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.

  • 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!

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

  • 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.

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

  • Love is someone you can be silly with

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

  • 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.

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