Quotes from Vidal Sassoon

Everything about morality and obligations I owe to football.

I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.'

If you get hold of a head of hair on somebody you've never seen before, cut beautiful shapes, cut beautiful architectural angles and she walks out looking so different - I think that's masterful.

'The Pianist' is a movie I could watch over and over again.

I don't sort of sit in a chair and pompously feel proud of myself about all the things we might have accomplished.

My mother had a premonition and she felt that hairdressing would be very very good for me.

It was my mother's idea. Her feeling was that I didn't have the intelligence to pick a trade myself.

Beauty is.. The passionate and positive expression of the complete self.

The essence is, what can we do next? And will it be good?

There were so many pretty girls coming into the salon as clients, and others working in the salon. And I thought, 'Hmm. This is rather nice.'

If you have a sense of style and purpose and will you don't want to compromise.

I just consider being one of the luckiest people in the sense that creativity came to me and it flowed.

You either create something and you keep it a secret and you die with it, or you can benefit the craft.

I came home after a year and although my profession was only hairdressing, I knew I could change it.

Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be 'somebody' so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.

I kept thinking I would be spending my life up to my elbows in shampoo.

Mary Quant is my favourite fashion designer.

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.

Hair excited me. As the old ways - backcombing, rollers and rigidity - went out of the window, I started to feel the possibilities in front of my eyes.

I got a telegraph from my mother who said that my step-father had had a heart attack, come home and earn a living. So I went back to England and the only thing I knew to earn any cash was through hairdressing.

When I was about 10 I ran away to see my father. He couldn't have cared less. He just took me back as soon as he could.

We learned to put discipline in the haircuts by using actual geometry, actual architectural shapes and bone structure. The cut had to be perfect and layered beautifully, so that when a woman shook it, it just fell back in.

I was all about my thoughts, my work, my inspiration. I was always in hair.

To me hair dressing means shape. It's very important that the foundations should be right.