Beaton Quotes & Sayings

Love is someone you can be silly with — Cecil Beaton

Steve Beaton, he's not Adonis, he's THE donis. — Sid Waddell

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

Clever plastic surgery can restore an appearance of youth, but nothing changes the expression of age and experience in the eyes. — M.C. Beaton

Leave a trail worth following." Darcy Creech, Peter Beaton — Holly Hurd

I imagine the wedding guests at Cana were awed and pleased by Jesus turning the water to wine. I also suspect that many guests in detox centers around the world today would think it a much greater miracle if, at least for them, the good Lord would retroactively turn the wine back to water. — Joe Beaton

The elite pursue careers that fulfill their minds, while the masses seek jobs that fill their stomachs. — Joe Beaton

No one could remain an atheist with larks around, he thought dreamily. — M.C. Beaton

Jilly Beaton's a vicious cow. Inspectors love her, but she's a cow when they've gone."
"Back home in Argentina," sniffed Isabella, "cows are very important, but they know their place. — Gabriella Poole

She turned out to be one of those irritating people who get up to leave and then stand in the doorway chattering away. — M.C. Beaton

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

Will Scott grinned. Grizel Beaton had slapped his face four times, and apart from these four small misjudgements, they had never touched on a topic more personal than which of Buccleuch's bastards to invite to the wedding. But he liked her fine; and she was good and broad where it would matter to future Buccleuchs, which summed up all his mind so far on the subject. — Dorothy Dunnett

A technical failure that shows some attempt at aesthetic expression is of infinitely more value than uninspired success. — Cecil Beaton

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

Do you know why more people don't sober up? Because they don't wear their livers on the outside. If everyone wore their liver on their forehead, say, it would be on full view and people would say, 'Heffens, Jock, that liver of yours is looking fair hobnailed,' and they would get shamed into doing something about it. — M.C. Beaton

Mrs. Wellington was wearing a voluminous flannel nightgown when she answered the door. Hamish was glad Mr. Wellington had found God, because it certainly looked as if he would need to wait until he got to heaven to get his reward. — M.C. Beaton

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

A sure sign of maturity in a young man is his recognition that beauty in a young woman does not presume physical attractiveness. — Joe Beaton

Steve Beaton - The adonis of darts, what poise, what elegance - a true roman gladiator with plenty of hair wax. — Sid Waddell

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

Husbands are always angry,
that's their nature.
And the nature of us women,
is not to pay a blind bit of notice. — M.C. Beaton

A lady is as young as the gentleman she feels, said Roy and cackled happily. — M.C. Beaton

How odd that people could be so ugly, not particularly because of appearence, but because of the atmosphere of judgemental bad temper and discontent they carried around with them — Beaton, M.C.

I started looking at fashion magazines, specifically 'British Vogue.' I was reading a lot about Cecil Beaton. Then I thought maybe I should start collecting. — Hamish Bowles

Nothing funny about happy people. I don't know, you just look at a situation or a life, and you can kind of pick up the areas of conflict and delve in there, because that's where the most story is. If someone's happily married for 20 years, that's great, but it's not that funny. — Kate Beaton

Just at the turn of the tide, nature held its breath - no bird sang, everything seemed to be waiting and waiting. And then, sure enough, as if someone had flicked a switch, everything started in motion again. — M.C. Beaton

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

Okay, I'm lazy. But being lazy is a talent. Sometimes it takes an awful lot of work. — M.C. Beaton

Ah, when love dies, women lose two and a half inches in height. — M.C. Beaton

I really believe in the power of comics as an educational thing, even ones as silly as mine, because they're a gateway to the actual thing. They're like an easy entrance. — Kate Beaton

Isn't it sad that we only get upset about nasty things happening to people and places if television decides we should? — M.C. Beaton

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour. — Annie Leibovitz

Hamish's family were unusual in that they had always celebrated Christmas - tree, turkey, presents and all. In parts of the Highlands, like Lochdubh, the old spirit of John Knox still wandered, blasting anyone with hellfire should they dare to celebrate this heathen festival. Hamish had often pointed out that none other than Luther was credited with the idea of the Christmas tree, having been struck by the sight of stars shining through the branches of an evergreen. But to no avail. Lochdubh lay silent and dark beside the black waters of the loch. — M.C. Beaton

Agatha's last case had concerned a Sweeny Todd of a murderer over at Winter Parva. — M.C. Beaton

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

Grace wasn't so sure. She had become accustomed to the photograph, of course, seeing it every day, but she didn't envy Nancy Beaton. The girl looked sad, Grace thought, and all of that shining material bunched behind her looked heavy, as if it were weighing her down. She didn't look like a shooting star about to streak across a dark sky, she looked anchored to the earth. Trapped. Like a butterfly in a jar. — Sarah Painter

Before Charles could stop her, Agatha, nervous, had launched into a full brag of all the cases she had solved. — M.C. Beaton

That was the trouble with so many reality programmes on television - everyone wanted fame these days without necessarily working at anything to achieve it. — M.C. Beaton

At the beginning of my career, as a boy from Peru in London, suddenly discovering British culture and society, I looked so much at the work of the photographers Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, which seemed to represent a wonderful vanished grandeur of my new country. — Mario Testino

What is elegance? Soap and water! — Cecil Beaton

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

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

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

I was told I make intelligent comics, and then I made a comic about a horse that pooped. — Kate 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 never wanted to be a literary writer. I wanted to be an entertainer. All I wanted was to give what a lot of writers had given me: a good time on a bad day. — M.C. Beaton

The truly fashionable are beyond fashion. — Cecil Beaton

And being very young and capable of violent mood swings, she then began to worry about what to wear for dinner. — M.C. Beaton

Various different people have inspired me throughout my career. From Francis Bacon to Vassareli, Coco Chanel to Christian Dior, Cecil Beaton, musicians, architects ... the list is endless. — Dries Van Noten

I don't spend as much time drawing as I do writing and reading. That's the really work-intensive part. And by the time I have enough material, it's often way past due time to put the comic up, and I'm already behind schedule, and I have to kind of rush it. — Kate Beaton

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

We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes. A third took the photographs. Another put the sketches in an exhibition, then into magazines, then in a book. — Alan Jay Lerner

A lot of the ways that I like to approach comic books, or anything like that, is not just the book itself, but the fans of it, the readers, the world that exists around it as a cultural object. — Kate Beaton

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

He fished steadily, trying to fight down a dragging, aching sense of loss, wondering how one's brain should know all the sensible answers while one's emotions longed for the unattainable. — M.C. Beaton

Christmas had done its usual merry work of setting husband against wife, relative against relative, and spreading bad will among men in general. People looked overfed and hung over and desperately worried about how much they had already spent. — M.C. Beaton

Good writing is writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. Sometimes, it happens to work right away, and that's amazing. But most of the time, it happens to work, and then you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and maybe it even comes back to the thing it was in the first place, but then you know for sure that it is good, and it's what you wanted to do. — Kate 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

When confronted with someone who appears to be in a perpetual state of outrage, it is tempting for other people to wind them up. Besides, I have always found the most vociferous guardians of morality on matters of sex are those who aren't getting any. — M.C. Beaton

Like most thin-skinned people who have been snubbed, he could not leave the snubbers alone. — M.C. Beaton

Although she far outranked Hamish, she had to wait patiently, because this was Lochdubh, where Hamish Macbeth was king. — M.C. Beaton

A library is a palace of dreams. — M.C. 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

The reason sex is fun is not to cater to the desire for individual human pleasure, but because hunanity would have ceased to exist a long time ago if it were drudgery. — Joe Beaton

Both Dietrich and Garbo occasionally came to Boaty's, the latter always escorted by Cecil Beaton, whom I'd met when he photographed me for Boaty's magazine (an overheard exchange between these two: Beaton, "The most distressing fact of growing older is that I find my private parts are shrinking." Garbo, after a mournful pause, "Ah, if only I could say the same.") — Truman Capote

It was a different social structure. I'd go to [David] Bailey's for dinner at 10:30. There were always girls there and a house full of ... I don't know, anybody. Cecil Beaton, Diana Cooper ... And there I am sitting down with these creatures of the 20th century, and it was normal to us. — Manolo Blahnik

The whistle of the old steam trains ... could conjure up visions of bleak distances with one solitary wail. — M.C. Beaton

More and more people each year are going abroad for Christmas ... Fed up with the fact that commercial Christmas starts in October. Fed up with carols. Dreading the arrival of Christmas cards from people they have forgotten to send a card to. Unable to bear yet another family get-together with Auntie Mary puking up in the corner after sampling too much of the punch. You see in the airports the triumphant glitter in the eyes of people who are leaving it all behind, including the hundredth rerun of Miracle on 34th Street. — M.C. Beaton

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. - William Hazlitt — M.C. 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

Religion's for those who believe in hell and a spiritual belief is for those who've been there. — M.C. 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 have a diverse audience, which is great, because I like doing things that are a bit more obscure, and I love doing things that are very popular as well. Each has its own bit of joy. So I try to mix it up. — Kate Beaton

What's gone, and what's past help Should be past grief. - William Shakespeare — M.C. Beaton

Snakes and bastards! — M.C. Beaton

Working at home is hard. It tends to give you bad habits. It feels more like you're going to work when you get up in the morning and leave your house and go somewhere. — Kate Beaton

I may not believe what you believe but I do believe in your right to believe it. — Joe Beaton

Blasted spam pigeons! — Kate Beaton