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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.
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San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities
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Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.
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[He stared into the camera] like some sort of an animal gazing from across the back of its sty. (On Winston Churchill)
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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 ...
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What is elegance? Soap and water!
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Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
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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.
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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.
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The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.
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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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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!
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I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.
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All I want is the best of everything and there's very little of that left.
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Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.
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I can't afford a whole new set of enemies.
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Love is someone you can be silly with
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A technical failure that shows some attempt at aesthetic expression is of infinitely more value than uninspired success.
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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.