Quotes from Cecil Beaton

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.

What is elegance? Soap and water!

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.

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.

Love is someone you can be silly with

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.

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

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.

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

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

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.