Vreeland Quotes & Sayings

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership. — Susan Vreeland

Archival and published history does not always record personal relationships of historical figures, so characters must be invented to allow the subject to reveal their interior realm through intimate interaction. — Susan Vreeland

The painting showed she did not yet know that lives end abruptly, that much of living is repetition and separation, that buttons forever need re-sewing no matter how ferociously one works the thread, that nice things almost happen. — Susan Vreeland

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place. — Susan Vreeland

Now he knew ... that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love. — Susan Vreeland

You don't have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive. — Diana Vreeland

Photographers aren't artists, for goodness sake. — Diana Vreeland

You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life. — Susan Vreeland

If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal — Susan Vreeland

When I arrived in America, I had these very dark red nails which some people objected to, but then some people object to absolutely everything. — Diana Vreeland

Don't think of Diana Vreeland's memoir as a book; it's more like a lunch. A bit of souffle, a glass of champagne, some green grapes - light, bubbly and slightly tart - all served up by an egocentric but inventive hostess. — Cathleen McGuigan

Within every girl is the possibility of arousing emotion. Without emotion there is no beauty. — Diana Vreeland

When I think how art education is eliminated whenever we get a budget crunch in the schools, I have to stand up and say that even when there was dire poverty ten blocks away from Tiffany Studios in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there was art and creativity within. — Susan Vreeland

After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park as I was writing 'Girl in Hyacinth Blue.' The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world beautiful. — Susan Vreeland

One thing I hold against Americans is that they have no flair for the rain. They seem unsettled by it; it's against them: they take it as an assault, an inconvenience! But rain is so wonderfully cleansing, so refreshing, so calming ... — Diana Vreeland

I have always felt that the only great thing about an interview is the questions that are asked. — Diana Vreeland

No one cuts backs like he did. No one knows what a back is anymore. — Diana Vreeland

I'm for everybody. There are no set rules. But if one's not a joiner. To hell with all of them! — Diana Vreeland

I mean, a new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress. — Diana Vreeland

I think laying out a beautiful picture in a beautiful way is a bloody bore. I think you've got to blow it right across the page and down the side, crop it, cut it in half, combine it with something else ... do something with it. You've got to make something out of it. — Diana Vreeland

Chutney is marvelous. I'm mad about it. To me, it's very imperial. — Diana Vreeland

Don't look left nor right and never compete. Never. Watching the other guy is what kills all forms of energy. — Diana Vreeland

Why don't you have a room done up in every color green? This will take months, years, to collect, but it will be delightful-a melange of plants, green glass, green porcelains, and furniture covered in sad greens, gay greens, clear, faded, and poison greens? — Diana Vreeland

I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity. — Diana Vreeland

I'm a person who is only invested in the pleasures and enjoyments of life. All the rest is left to the men. I've always remained what you might call "feminine" about the whole [work] thing. — Diana Vreeland

Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world. — Diana Vreeland

When fashion turns over it brings in little tiny creaks and cracks. This is the fascination and that is where you have to watch every step. — Diana Vreeland

I adore that pink, it is the navy blue of India! — Diana Vreeland

This is a weakness of the world. Someone thinks they've discovered something for the first time. They want to be authoritative about it. — Diana Vreeland

I always wear my sweater back-to-front; it is so much more flattering. — Diana Vreeland

Truth is a hell of a big point with me. Now I exaggerate - always. — Diana Vreeland

The body must stay fit. Fit people like themselves much better. — Diana Vreeland

I have a terrible time remembering exactly when my birthday is. Age is totally boring ... — Diana Vreeland

You're not supposed to give people what they want, you're supposed to give them what they don't know that they want yet. — Diana Vreeland

We all need a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I am against. — Diana Vreeland

I've never met a leopard print I didn't like. — Diana Vreeland

He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed. — Susan Vreeland

Think hard before you begin, then enter the work. — Susan Vreeland

You think because I am her mother I can remake her? — Susan Vreeland

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that. — Susan Vreeland

For goodness sakes, beware of curls ... It is a great art to do them so that the girls not only look modern - but do not suddenly look very vulgar. — Diana Vreeland

Reproducing nature slavishly is not art. — Susan Vreeland

Train yourselves by seeking and acknowledging beauty moment by moment every day of your lives," he told them. "Exercise your eyes. Take pleasure in the grace of shape and the excitement of color. — Susan Vreeland

Of course I was always mad about the ballet russe, mad about it! — Diana Vreeland

Don't you loathe the word "workaholic"? It has nothing to do with an important thing, that you and your secretary are at the office until 6:30. But that's life, kiddo. 24-hour work doesn't go on in America. 24-hour work is what Italy and Holland did after the war. The lights never went out! — Diana Vreeland

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds. — Susan Vreeland

Red is the great clarifier - bright and revealing. I can't imagine becoming bored with red - it would be like becoming bored with the person you love. — Diana Vreeland

Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation. — Susan Vreeland

I wasn't a fashion editor. I was the one and only fashion editor. — Diana Vreeland

Oh, but I think that thoughtfulness and manners are everything. — Diana Vreeland

The only thing people are interested in is people. — Diana Vreeland

There was a time when it was considered vulgar and unnecessary to pursue money, but today anyone who doesn't believe in money must be out of their minds! — Diana Vreeland

I once heard someone say, I shall die very young. How young? I don't know. Maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young. — Diana Vreeland

A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste-it's hearty, it's healthy, it's physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I'm against. — Diana Vreeland

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time. — Susan Vreeland

A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead. — Susan Vreeland

The crisis prompted the issue of emergency paper money: in Britain, £1 and 10s Treasury notes; in the United States, the emergency currency that banks were authorized to issue under the Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908.46 Then, as now, the authorities reacted to a liquidity crisis by printing money. — Niall Ferguson

Pink is the navy blue of India. — Diana Vreeland

To feel the grace of God in a painting of the dear, quiet commonness of a domestic interior, or in a landscape, seascape, cityscape, trains us to feel the grace of God in the thing itself in situ. — Susan Vreeland

Too much good taste can be very boring. Independent style, on the other hand, can be very inspiring. — Diana Vreeland

Water is God's tranquilizer, — Diana Vreeland

The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb. — Diana Vreeland

The future holds a golden world. It will be for beauty; it will be for intelligent productiveness. — Diana Vreeland

'Luncheon of the Boating Party,' owned by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has served Americans as a symbol of France and French culture, both of which I love, and is as evocative and triumphant an image as that other emissary of France, the Statue of Liberty. — Susan Vreeland

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper. — Susan Vreeland

The way to judge a good hand is that the fingers are the same size at the tip as where they come out of the hand itself. — Diana Vreeland

Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent. — Susan Vreeland

Allowing beauty a place in the soul was a powerful antidote to the stress and strain of mortal life. — Susan Vreeland

You can see and feel everything in clothes. — Diana Vreeland

No matter where life takes you ... the place where you stand at any moment is holy ground. Love hard and love wide and love long, and you will find goodness in it. — Susan Vreeland

I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I'm sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work. You see that with artists, don't you? Once they get their first retrospective, it's really hard for them to push ahead. — Suzy Menkes

Money has nothing to do with style at all, but naturally it helps every situation. — Diana Vreeland

Lighting is everything in a color. — Diana Vreeland

Where Chanel came from in France is anyone's guess. She said one thing one day and another thing the next. She was a peasant - and a genius. Peasants and geniuses are the only people who count and she was both. — Diana Vreeland

One more thing. She wears Patchouli. Every tart in Montmartre wears it. Place Pigalle reeks of it. If she wants to carry out her pose as an aristocrat, she ought to refine her tastes. — Susan Vreeland

I wish I could swap closets with Diana Vreeland, but I think only my left thigh would fit into her clothing. — Catherine Martin

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. — Susan Vreeland

The company, Tiffany Studios, ended up in bankruptcy in 1930 - early '30s. — Susan Vreeland

I wonder about prisoners. They're told, "You are free, you are innocent, you can go anywhere." I'm sure they usually feel nothing. They don't burst into tears or hysterics or joy or "I told you so." It's nothing. To be on the straight path isn't a bloody thing. It's just ordinary. — Diana Vreeland

I sincerely believe that energy grows from itself and the more energy you expand the more you create within yourself. — Diana Vreeland

Erasmus says if you must be hanged let it be on fair gallows. — Susan Vreeland

I am tired of the cult of youth. The cultural rejection of old age, the stigmatization of wrinkles, grey hair, of bodies furrowed by the years. I am fascinated by Diana Vreeland, Georgia O'Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois, women who have let time embrace them without ever cheating. Society today condemns this, me, I celebrate it. — Tom Ford

I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change. — Susan Vreeland

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion. — Susan Vreeland

Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life ... It's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. — Susan Vreeland

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion. — Susan Vreeland

Look long enough, out or in, and you'll be glad you are who you are. — Susan Vreeland

Too much good taste can be boring — Diana Vreeland

<"To bewitch" is to me always slightly artificial as it is always put on
whereas witchery is a form of naturalness that some people can't help, and the world judges that they don't create it ... > November 15 1967 memo to Mrs. Loew Gross re "THE ROMANTIC POINT OF VIEW — Diana Vreeland

The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it. — Susan Vreeland

Being vulgar is fine, but oh please just don't be boring. — Diana Vreeland

Parents, you know, can be terrible. — Diana Vreeland

Fashion needs incredible women, alive, stimulating, with style like Diana Vreeland. She is the most. The way she talks expresses all her values. — Gianni Versace

In the end, it's only the moments that we have. — Susan Vreeland

To feel the coolness of the blue glass, like solid pieces of the sea. — Susan Vreeland

I think your imagination is your reality — Diana Vreeland

I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original. — Susan Vreeland

The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell - unquestionably. You just couldn't take a bad picture of those two old girls — Diana Vreeland

I like to indulge myself by sitting up late without having to do anything in the morning. — Diana Vreeland

He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it. — Susan Vreeland