Top 31 Quotes & Sayings by Peter Beard

The institution of marriage should be re-examined because of its overwhelming claustrophobia. The odds are stacked against spontaneity and effervescence. It's an institution that was brought about for the sake of family and children, but biologically, it's very unnatural. It's masochism and torture the way it's been organized.

I'm an escapist. I'm not a planner; I've never made a decision about anything in my life. The good thing about Africa is that you can escape forever. You can do what you want without someone looking over your shoulder.

I didn't feel the tusk go through me. But I did feel this sort of freight elevator coming down, popping the chicken bones, you know. It blinded me. Everything was black. It was bright noon day sun. You mustn't get walked on by elephants.

I made a life for myself in Africa that was as far as you could possibly get from art school at Yale.

In New York, I live on a compost heap of all the stuff I accumulate.

Elephants are like humans. They are very smart, very logical.

We're adding a billion people every decade. We're just spin doctors. Whatever we do is supposedly great, and yet it's always at the expense of diversity and nature. We're like elephants. The ecology of the elephant is more similar to human than any other.

I did have a very advanced grandmother, my mother's mother, who wanted to buy me a camera. My parents wouldn't let her. Eventually she won, and I got a camera in about 1948, a Voigtlander.

I was extremely irritated being photographed for a long time, then I gave up caring. Photography is a nauseating cliche, but there is a lot to it. You can tell so much about a person from it. You are exaggerating the consciousness. It's life-thickening, photography.

It's such a waste, sleep. You're just lying there.

The last thing left in nature is the beauty of women.

My family was never happy with me. I could just say that across the board.

I graduated. I did History of Art, you know, all those things - American Studies - and then I went to art school, and I did Joseph Alvarez in the art school.

I don't mind the word 'dilettante.' A dilettante means someone who does what he loves.

Conservation is for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingeses.

I'm learning that human pressure on wildlife is becoming increasingly dangerous. You've got to be more alert because more animals have been pushed around, wounded, subjected to human harassment, ambushed, all kinds of stress. When they attack, it's totally predictable.

I'm for conservation, but it's mostly a con. That's the trouble. It's sentimental. Buy an elephant a drink, a lion an acre.

Life is just a flick of the fingers. Let's face it. And any little bit - you can expand it or enrich it, I think you want to push that and do it.

I've never gotten a release from any person. I'm not a businessman; I'm on the side of common sense. Releases ruin the atmosphere of photography.

In the high level cartoon world, my number one admired hero would be Chas Addams - really a top, top artist that the 'New Yorker' was lucky to find and employ.

An artist who goes around proclaiming that the art he's making is art is probably making a serious mistake. And that's one mistake I try not to make.

I've never had underwear of any kind, anything that you have to wash.

I am a parasite off beauty.

I think the camera is a wonderful machine, don't you? And not to take photographs in this century is crazy.

The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively.

Being so pathetic, I don't read. I just ... do things - writing out interviews you can't read, on pictures of footprints and things like that. I kind of like the idea of nailing the thing down and not really showing too much about it. There's just so much you can take for collage nowadays.

I used to do horseback riding in the South, and it was just things I'd be pasting. I think my diaries was just an infantile desire to record things. I liked saving things instead of writing.

I had some highlight moments in the early '60s when I used to do a lot of rubbings. I used Afta; it's an amazing chemical. If you pour it on something and rub, you get amazing results. Before that, I used lighter fluid and, well, I've always liked blood. Everybody thinks I am very sick, but the thing is, blood is better than any ink or paint.

Photography should be redefined. It's largely technical... Photography is just unbelievably limiting. I always think of David Bailey and all the fashion photographers - they overlap, you can't always tell who did it. I don't really even like photography all that much. I just think it's so overdone.

I like things that don't look like you're in control. It's like life itself. You just learn how to benefit from accidents and chances that you take.

Like society, the diary is a world of useless secrets. Everything is there, yet there is nothing.