1.
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.
Cecil Beaton
2.
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.
Cecil Beaton
3.
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
Cecil Beaton
4.
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.
Cecil Beaton
5.
All I want is the best of everything and there's very little of that left.
Cecil Beaton
6.
Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.
Cecil Beaton
7.
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!
Cecil Beaton
8.
The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.
Cecil Beaton
9.
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.
Cecil Beaton
10.
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.
Cecil Beaton
11.
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.
Cecil Beaton
12.
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.
Cecil Beaton
13.
Love is someone you can be silly with
Cecil Beaton
14.
What is elegance? Soap and water!
Cecil Beaton
15.
I can't afford a whole new set of enemies.
Cecil Beaton
16.
San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities
Cecil Beaton
17.
I want to make photographs of very elegant women taking the lipstick off their teeth.
Cecil Beaton
18.
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.
Cecil Beaton
19.
[He stared into the camera] like some sort of an animal gazing from across the back of its sty. (On Winston Churchill)
Cecil Beaton
20.
A technical failure that shows some attempt at aesthetic expression is of infinitely more value than uninspired success.
Cecil Beaton
