Charles Bukowski Quotes

The human race had always disgusted me. essentially, what made them disgusting was the family-relationship illness, which included marriage, exchange of power and aid, which neighborhood, your district, your city, your county, your state, your nation-everybody grabbing each other's assholes in the Honeycomb of survival out of a fear-animalistic stupidity.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.

I seldom know what I'm going to write when I sit down. There isn't much agony and sweat of the human spirit involved in doing it. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

there's no defense except all the errors made

I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.

I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even stupidly happy almost without cause and left alone I am mostly content.

I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I'd become a monk. I'd pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine.

Dying in a a war never stopped wars from happening.

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

If I have any advice to anybody it's this: take up watercolor painting.

Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer.

I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.

People do too much. They say too much.

I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

Success is always dangerous. It can make an asshole out of anybody.

writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

dont undress my love you might find a mannequin dont undress the mannequin you might find love. shes long ago forgotten me. hes trying on a new hat and looks more the coquette then ever. she is a child and a mannequin and death. i can't hate that. she didnt do anything unusual. I only wanted her to.

You've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her,and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.

you are on the freeway threading through traffic now, moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful and so disappointing because we are all so alike and so different.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

The apartment was built at the edge of a high cliff so that when you looked out the back window it seemed as if you were twelve floors up instead of four. It was very much like living on the edge of the world - a last resting place before the final big drop.

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

my mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?" and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw

Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.

i was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.

When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.

The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

and love was lightning and remembrance

the grace is being able to like rock music, symphony music, jazz … anything that contains the original energy of joy.

I broke that town in half like a wooden match.

I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.

If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start.

My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.

I walk into the kitchen, look at the typer down there on the floor. It's a dirty floor. It's a dirty typer that types dirty stories

That's how it is with books, isn't it: They're not in a hurry. They'll wait for you till you're ready. People empty me. I have to go away to refill.

I have two rules. One is, never trust a man who smokes a pipe. The other is, never trust a man with shiny shoes.

Don't ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.

there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails.