Cecil Beaton Quotes

The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.

Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.

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.

San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

Mrs Woolf’s complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.

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.

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