Top 100 Vreeland's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a sentry tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for.
Susan Vreeland
#4. Beauty has nothing to do with possession. If possession and beauty must go together, then we are lost souls. A beautiful flower is not to be possessed, it's there to be beheld. ... It's there for your pleasure.
Diana Vreeland
#5. No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.
Susan Vreeland
#6. 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
#7. Being vulgar is fine, but oh please just don't be boring.
Diana Vreeland
#8. 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
#9. I'm for everybody. There are no set rules. But if one's not a joiner. To hell with all of them!
Diana Vreeland
#10. I never felt comfortable about my looks until I married Reed Vreeland. I believe in love at first sight because that's what it was. I knew the moment our eyes met that we would marry,
Diana Vreeland
#11. 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
#12. Everybody works ... That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.
Susan Vreeland
#13. I'm terrible on facts. But I always have an idea. If you have an idea, you're well ahead
Diana Vreeland
#14. '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
#15. Balenciaga often said that women did not have to be perfect or beautiful to wear his clothes. When they wore his clothes, they became beautiful.
Diana Vreeland
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Vogue always did stand for people's lives. I mean, a new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress, and the sort of life you had lived before, and what you will do in it later.
Diana Vreeland
#20. It's not about the dress you wear, but it's about the life you lead in the dress.
Diana Vreeland
#21. 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
#22. The first thing to do is to arrange to be born in Paris. After that, everything follows quite naturally.
Diana Vreeland
#23. 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
#24. I wasn't a fashion editor. I was the one and only fashion editor.
Diana Vreeland
#27. 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
#28. I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change.
Susan Vreeland
#29. I ventured into fiction in 1988 with 'What Love Sees,' a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness.
Susan Vreeland
#30. I always say I hope to God I die in a town with a good tailor, a good shoemaker, and perhaps someone who's interested in a little quelque chose d'autre.
Diana Vreeland
#32. Each time we enter imaginatively into the life of another, it's a small step upwards in the elevation of the human race.
Susan Vreeland
#33. The best time to leave a party is when the party's just beginning. There's no drink that kills except the drink that you didn't want to take, as the saying goes, and there's no hour that kills except the hour you stayed after you wanted to go home.
Diana Vreeland
#34. 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
#35. I think allure is something around you, like a perfume or like a scent. It's like a memory ... it pervades.
Diana Vreeland
#36. 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
#37. A lie to get out of something, or take an advantage for oneself, that's one thing; but a lie to make life more interesting - well, that's entirely different.
Diana Vreeland
#38. Chutney is marvelous. I'm mad about it. To me, it's very imperial.
Diana Vreeland
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.
Susan Vreeland
#42. Don't look back. Just go ahead. Give ideas away. Under every idea there's a new idea waiting to be born.
Diana Vreeland
#43. There's only one very good life and that's the life you know you want and you make it yourself.
Diana Vreeland
#45. I mean, a new dress doesn't get you anywhere; it's the life you're living in the dress.
Diana Vreeland
#46. I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.
Susan Vreeland
#47. How easily a parent's motive could be misconstrued by an injured child.
Susan Vreeland
#49. You gotta have style. It helps you get down the stairs. It helps you get up in the morning. It's a way of life. Without it, you're nobody.
Diana Vreeland
#51. When I was married, I didn't work. When I had my children, I didn't work. But before that, I'd work for Diana Vreeland at 'Harper's Bazaar.'
Lee Radziwill
#52. We are not looking for endless variety
we are looking for fashion.
Diana Vreeland
#53. I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.
Susan Vreeland
#54. 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
#55. He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.
Susan Vreeland
#57. You know the greatest thing is passion, without it what have you got? I mean if you love someone you can love them as much as you can love them but if it isn't a passion, it isn't burning, it isn't on fire, you haven't lived.
Diana Vreeland
#58. You don't have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive.
Diana Vreeland
#59. Naturally, I've always been mad about clothes. You don't get born in Paris to forget about clothes for a minute.
Diana Vreeland
#60. It's only intelligent to wish to look after yourself properly.
Diana Vreeland
#61. Balenciaga was incredibleI was madly infatuated with his clothes. His clothes were devastating. One fainted. One simply blew up and died.
Diana Vreeland
#62. For a century, everyone assumed that the iconic Tiffany lamps were conceived and designed by that American master of stained glass. Not so! It was a woman!
Susan Vreeland
#63. Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.
Diana Vreeland
#64. There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.
Susan Vreeland
#66. 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
#67. The company, Tiffany Studios, ended up in bankruptcy in 1930 - early '30s.
Susan Vreeland
#68. A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead.
Susan Vreeland
#69. Maybe that's what love was
walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other.
Susan Vreeland
#71. If I don't love the feelings I have while creating those windows, I'm only working for coin and not from soul.
Susan Vreeland
#73. A world without leopards, well, who would want to live in it?
Diana Vreeland
#75. The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all.
Lynn Steward
#76. 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
#77. You think because I am her mother I can remake her?
Susan Vreeland
#78. It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.
Susan Vreeland
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Erasmus says if you must be hanged let it be on fair gallows.
Susan Vreeland
#83. What do I think about the way most people dress? Most people are not something one thinks about.
Diana Vreeland
#84. I think when you're young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows and it all comes together.
Diana Vreeland
#85. All people are meant to be creative in a certain way. What way? Perhaps I was cut out to be a wonderful housewife, with a marvelous sense of cooking, being with my friends, running a perfect house. But I am not ambitious towards anything.
Diana Vreeland
#86. Don't look left nor right and never compete. Never. Watching the other guy is what kills all forms of energy.
Diana Vreeland
#87. The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.
Diana Vreeland
#88. I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.
Susan Vreeland
#89. In a Balenciaga you were the only woman in the room - no other woman existed.
Diana Vreeland
#90. I was always sort of a loner, I suppose. I always had to think out everything for myself ... I suppose that is what you call a loner.
Diana Vreeland
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Work is love made plain, whether man's work or woman's work.
Susan Vreeland
#94. Allure is a word very few people use nowadays, but it's something that exists. Allure holds you, doesn't it? Whether it's a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in the crowd or someone sitting opposite you at lunch ... you are held
Diana Vreeland
#95. Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.
Diana Vreeland
#96. The only thing people are interested in is people.
Diana Vreeland
#97. 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
#98. Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola.
Diana Vreeland
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