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

- Cecil Beaton

What is elegance? Soap and water!

- 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

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

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

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

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

- 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

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

- Cecil Beaton

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

- 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

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

- Cecil Beaton