Cecil Beaton Quotes

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

[He stared into the camera] like some sort of an animal gazing from across the back of its sty. (On Winston Churchill)

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

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

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.

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.