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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.
Cecil Beaton

What is elegance? Soap and water!
Cecil Beaton