I keep the shutters closed because I like to work in a hermetic environment. I like mirrors. When you look out of the window, all you see is ugliness, but when you look in the mirror all you see is beauty.

I have no right to beauty. I had been condemned to masculine ugliness.

In matters large and small, many people seemed concerned about churlishness, an ugliness in our relationships that appears to be increasing rather than decreasing.

The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves.

A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

I hate ugliness. You know I'm allergic to ugliness.

I seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

In the course of our daily lives, we're bombarded with a barrage of visual messages, some blatantly aggressive, some subtle. The trick is to find a way to break through without adding to the clutter and the ugliness. We have to be responsible about that.

I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

Since our persons are not of our own making, when they are such as appear defective or uncomely, it is, methinks, an honest and laudable fortitude to dare to be ugly.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

When the eye fails to find beauty-alias solace-it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness.

I don't mind plain women being Puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain.