beautiful people

Isabella Blow

2010-04-01T10:46:00.001-07:00

“I smoke so many cigarettes, there's no way I could have a glossy lipstick.”

"If you don't wear lipstick, I can't talk to you. You need to have lips - they are important for getting men.”

“She had an amazing figure and her clothes were very severe and elegant.”

"I think people have to plan their house so they look good in it. Wallis Simpson's clothes were amazing, she was my heroine; but not her house, it was too busy for the clothes."

"A cheaper and less painful form of plastic surgery." - explaining her love of hats.

Faye Dunaway

2010-02-25T16:24:00.001-08:00

I'm kind of a recluse.

I'm still the little southern girl from the wrong side of the tracks who really didn't feel like she belonged.

I often say the last role I played that really touched me and where I was able to access what I really am was Bonnie, which is kind of sad when you think how early in my career that was.

I mean, I was always interested in people like Lenny Bruce, people who are breaking the old rules and making new ones.

It's interesting as one grows older to keep in touch with the cutting edge.

It's true, I did a lot of great movies, and I'm happy. It was what it was, and now I think all of that has fed into where I am now, and I think it has taught me a lot.

My mother's passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, was to shape my entire life.

You are an athlete when you're onstage. You can't get tired.

Well, softness and femininity... people don't expect of me; so when they find me emotional and capable of real vulnerability, they're surprised.

The whole era when I was busy being a big movie star was terribly disconcerting. I was cared for and cosseted, and yet I was totally dependent.

Years are not important, my dear.

- Faye Dunaway

Ginger Rogers

2010-02-18T11:34:00.000-08:00

"My mother told me I was dancing before I was born. She could feel my toes tapping wildly inside her for months."

"When two people love each other, they don't look at each other; they look in the same direction."

"The only way to enjoy anything in this life is to earn it first."

"I don't know which I like best. I love the applause on the stage. But pictures are so fascinating-- you reach many millions through them. And you make more money too."

"When you're happy, you don't count the years."

"Hollywood is like an empty wastebasket."

[On her partnership with Astaire] "After all, it's not as if we were Abbott and Costello. We did have careers apart from each other."

"The most important thing in anyone's life is to be giving something. The quality I can give is fun, joy and happiness. This is my gift."

Benicio del Toro

2010-01-24T10:44:00.000-08:00

“I'm not Jack Nicholson. I'm not Brando. But I do mumble.”

“I trained as a theater actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.”

“I don't think I could be a foot soldier. I don't know if I could take orders too good. I'm a little lazy.”

“I feel like if they put me in the driver's seat, I'm going to take the wheel.”

- Benicio del Toro

Ava Gardner

2009-12-20T09:34:00.000-08:00

“Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.”

“I don't understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”

“I think the main reason my marriages failed is that I always loved too well but never wisely.”

“Some people say Liz and I are whores, but we are saints. We do not hide our loves hypocritically, and when in love, we are loyal and faithful to our men. [On the subject of her multiple marriages]”

“I suffered, I really suffered, with all three of my husbands. And I tried damn hard with all three, starting each marriage certain that it was going to last until the end of my life. Yet none of them lasted more than a year or two.”

“I couldn't imagine a better place [Australia] for making a film on the end of the world.”

“After my screen test, the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled: "She can't talk! She can't act! She's sensational!"”

“Because I was promoted as a sort of a siren and played all those sexy broads, people made the mistake of thinking I was like that off the screen. They couldn't have been more wrong.”

“I have only one rule in acting: trust the director and give him heart and soul.”

Frances McDormand

2009-12-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

“I'm a character actress, plain and simple... Who can worry about a career? Have a life. Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.”

- Frances McDormand

Grace Kelly

2009-11-12T17:48:00.000-08:00

As an unmarried woman, I was thought to be a danger.

Emancipation of women has made them lose their mystery.

For a woman, forty is torture, the end.

Getting angry doesn't solve anything.

I don't like yelling and fighting, and I can't quarrel.

I don't want to be married to someone who feels inferior to my success or because I make more money than he does.

I don't want to dress up a picture with just my face.

If anybody starts using me as scenery, I'll return to New York.

Other women looked on me as a rival. And it pained me a great deal.

The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.

Woman's natural role is to be a pillar of the family.

- Grace Kelly

Happy birthday, Grace.

Twiggy

2009-10-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

I used to be a thing; I'm a person now.

The sixties were a time when ordinary people could do extraordinary things...!

I'm basically an up kind of person, not a depressive one. So whatever's happening, my head doesn't get that down and moody... I didn't get into a particularly swinging way of life, as the press would have liked to make out. We never went to parties because we hated them. I've really had a boring, ordinary life on the social level. I haven't been to all-night parties and I haven't had a million boyfriends and my favourite pastimes are still the same, sitting at home watching telly or going to a nice restaurant for dinner or having an evening at home sewing.

They called me an "elongated matchstick", "the original million-dollar baby doll". You were supposed to look like Brenda Lee, very curvy and round, pointed breasts and pointed toe shoes. In all these pictures of me around twelve I'm wearing a brassiere with Kleenex stuffed in it...Most of the pictures of me taken then, I hate now

What happened to me in the Sixties was so major and so worldwide and so huge, there's no way I can repeat it. But in a way, I had nothing to do with it, it just took me over. It was bizarre, it was weird, and I had no control over it. I don't think anyone could have planned what happened to me.

At sixteen, I was funny, skinny little thing, all eyelashes and legs. And then, suddenly people told me it was gorgeous. I thought they had gone mad.

Jane Seymour

2009-10-08T13:39:00.001-07:00

“You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life- so that if it were over tomorrow, you'd be content with yourself.”

“Music has brought me some of the highest moments of my life. I don't even hear the music. I don't even hear the notes. I'm not aware that someone has turned on a tape machine - I'm in another world.”

“Motherhood has relaxed me in many ways. You learn to deal with crisis. I've become a juggler, I suppose. It's all a big circus, and nobody who knows me believes I can manage, but sometimes I do.”

“Even though I make those movies, I find myself wishing that more of those magic moments could happen in real life.”

“You cannot do everything at once, so find people you trust to help you. And don't be afraid to say no.”

“Live each day the fullest you can, not guaranteeing there'll be a tomorrow, not dwelling endlessly on yesterday.”

- Jane Seymour

Marion Davies

2009-08-27T12:44:00.001-07:00

"With me it was 5 per cent talent and 95 per cent publicity."

- Marion Davies

Percy Bysshe Shelley

2009-08-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.

Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.

Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Kate Winslet

2009-05-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

“Life is short, and it is here to be lived.”

“I've been Skinny; it's fucking boring.”

“Loving someone is setting them free, letting them go.”

“Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear.”

“Mum and dad were very much friends, and up to life. There was no anxiety for anything when I was growing up, they just taught me to be me.”

“I wouldn't dream of working on something that didn't make my gut rumble and my heart want to explode.”

“I like exposing myself. There's not an awful lot that embarrasses me. I'm the kind of actress who absolutely believes in exposing herself.”

“There are moments to indulge and enjoy, but I always know when it's time to go home and wash my knickers.”

- Kate Winslet

(photo by Mario Testino)

Charlotte Rampling

2009-05-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

"I am fascinated by the whole process of what it's like to be alive, whether it's unbelievably uncomfortable and horrible or whether it's quite nice."

"If words don't have vibration behind them, and a real feeling behind them, then they're just words."

"One of the reasons I don't see eye to eye with Women's Lib is that women have it all on a plate if only they knew it. They don't have to be pretty either."

"To grieve is something extremely difficult. We don't even know how to begin to grieve, and I don't know how you can be taught to grieve."

"You cannot watch yourself dispassionately."

- Charlotte Rampling

Anna May Wong

2009-04-16T12:27:00.000-07:00

"Every time your picture is taken, you lose a part of your soul."

"I'm Anna May Wong. I come from old Hong Kong. But now I'm a Hollywood star."

"I've come to the conclusion that everybody should marry, including me."

- Anna May Wong

Eleanor Roosevelt

2009-01-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

"A woman is like a tea bag--you never know how strong she is until you get her in hot water."

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right--for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

"It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself."

"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life."

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

"People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

Cate Blanchett

2009-01-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

“If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life—that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment—that would be the perfect state.”

- Cate Blanchett

Audrey Hepburn

2008-12-29T13:21:00.000-08:00

“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”

- Audrey Hepburn

Agnes Moorehead

2008-12-11T09:58:00.000-08:00

Scarlett Johansson

2008-12-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

“If you're comfortable with yourself, then it's sexy. Maybe people think I look sexy because I feel sexy. I am a very liberated person that way. I'm very comfortable with my sexuality, my body, my face--well, sometimes I'm not comfortable with my face, but it's stuck there and there's nothing I can do about it.”

Scarlett Johansson

Rosemary Clooney

2008-11-28T08:15:00.000-08:00

"I'll keep working as long as I live because singing has taken on the feeling of joy that I had when I started, when my only responsibility was to sing well. "

Rosemary Clooney

Jean-Michel Basquiat

2008-11-23T16:37:00.000-08:00

"I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life."

Jean-Michel Basquiat

(photo by Mark Sink)

Barbara Streisand

2008-11-19T12:54:00.000-08:00

Barbara Streisand quotes:

I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven.

Around people I don't know, I'm totally at a loss.

I go by instinct--I don't worry about experience.

I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.

The audience is the best judge of anything. They cannot be lied to. Truth brings them closer. A moment that lags - they're gonna cough.

I'm not that ambitious any more. I just like my privacy. I wish I really wasn't talked about at all.

How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.

You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.

It is every woman's dream to be some man's dream woman.

What is exciting is not for one person to be stronger than the other... but for two people to have met their match and yet they are equally as stubborn, as obstinate, as passionate, as crazy as the other.

There is nothing more important in life than love.

June Mansfield

2008-11-15T10:57:00.000-08:00

June Mansfield was Henry Miller's wife. Anais Nin wrote, upon meeting June for the first time, in December 1931 "A startingly white face, burning eyes. June Mansfield, Henry's wife. As she came towards me from the darkness of my garden into the light of the doorway I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Years ago, when I tried to imagine a pure beauty, I had created an image in my mind of just that woman. I had even imagined she would be Jewish. I knew long ago the color of her skin, her profile, her teeth. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her I felt that I would do anything she asked of me. Henry faded, She was color, brilliance, strangeness."

Javier Bardem

2008-11-13T17:21:00.000-08:00

"The only thing I can do is act, but it's not something I even feel comfortable doing. It costs me a lot, because I'm a shy person, even if I don't look it. "

- Javier Bardem

Elizabeth Taylor

2008-11-12T13:49:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Taylor Quotes:

Big girls need big diamonds.

I adore wearing gems, but not because they are mine. You can't possess radiance, you can only admire it.

I don't pretend to be an ordinary housewife.

I have a woman's body and a child's emotions.

I suppose when they reach a certain age some men are afraid to grow up. It seems the older the men get, the younger their new wives get.

I sweat real sweat and I shake real shakes.

I've always admitted that I'm ruled by my passions.

It's not the having, it's the getting.

Reese Witherspoon

2008-11-11T10:29:00.000-08:00

Photograph by Mario Testino; gown by Nina Ricci; "Vogue" Novmber 2008

“Many people worry so much about managing their careers, but rarely spend half that much energy managing their LIVES. I want to make my life, not just my job, the best it can be. The rest will work itself out.”

- Reese Witherspoon

Carole Lombard

2008-11-09T08:11:00.000-08:00

“I live by a man's code, designed to fit a man's world, yet at the same time I never forget that a woman's first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick.”

- Carole Lombard

Madonna

2008-11-08T09:41:00.000-08:00

Madonna quotes:

“I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.”

“A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don't get what they want.”

“Sometimes you have to be a bitch to get things done.”

“I'm tough, ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”

“When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm thirsty, I drink. When I feel like saying something, I say it.”

“Everyone probably thinks that I'm a raving nymphomaniac, that I have an insatiable sexual appetite, when the truth is I'd rather read a book.”

“I stand for freedom of expression, doing what you believe in, and going after your dreams.”

“Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as a sheep.”

“Never forget to dream."

Nazimova

2008-11-08T09:40:00.000-08:00

Virginia Woolf

2008-11-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

Virginia Woolf quotes:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Language is wine upon the lips.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Marilyn Monroe

2008-11-07T20:59:00.002-08:00

Marilyn Monroe quotes:

It's all make believe, isn't it?

If I'd observed all the rules, I'd never have got anywhere.

I'm very definitely a woman and I enjoy it.

I don't know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.

I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.

I don't want to make money. I just want to be wonderful.

I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I am an actress.

I am trying to prove to myself that I am a person. Then may be I'll convince myself that I'm an actress.

People respect you because they feel you've survived hard times and endured, and although you've become famous, you haven't become phony.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer.

I love to do the things the censors won't pass.

hat good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can't I just be an ordinary woman? A woman who can have a family ... I'd settle for just one baby. My own baby.

I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.... I guess I am a fantasy.

A career is wonderful thing, but you can't snuggle up to it on a cold night.

It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone.

Mae West

2008-11-07T20:59:00.001-08:00

Lee Miller

2008-11-07T20:57:00.000-08:00

“Other people tend to value you the way you value yourself.”

- Lee Miller

(photo by Man Ray)

Joan Crawford

2008-11-07T20:56:00.000-08:00

Joan Crawford quotes:

I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty... in every form.

I love playing bitches. There's a lot of bitch in every woman - a lot in every man.

I need sex for a clear complexion, but I'd rather do it for love.

I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.

If you have an ounce of common sense and one good friend you don't need an analyst.

You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise you will be destroyed.

Greta Garbo

2008-11-07T20:55:00.000-08:00

Greta Garbo quotes:

I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference.

If only those who dream about Hollywood knew how difficult it all is.

The story of my life is about back entrances, side doors, secret elevators and other ways of getting in and out of places so that people won't bother me.

Your joys and sorrows. You can never tell them. You cheapen the inside of yourself if you do tell them.

I don't want to be a silly temptress. I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures.

I wish I were supernaturally strong so I could put right everything that is wrong.

Is there anything better than to be longing for something, when you know it is within reach?

Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.

Frida Kahlo

2008-11-07T20:54:00.002-08:00

Frida Kahlo quotes:

“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”

“I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”

"The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.”

“My painting carries with it the message of pain.”

“There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.”

“Painting completed my life.”

“I hope the departure is joyful and I hope never to return.”

Edward Weston

2008-11-07T20:54:00.001-08:00

Edward Weston quotes:

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea.

Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately. Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it my be.

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

Conchita Montenegro, 1931

2008-11-07T20:53:00.000-08:00

Anais Nin

2008-11-07T20:48:00.000-08:00

Anais Nin quotes:

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

"Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age. "

"Do not seek the because. In love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."

"Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living."

"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."

"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not possibly born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do."

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."

"The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle."