The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.
Charles BukowskiI knew exactly what I was doing: I was doing nothing. because I knew there was nothing to do.
Charles BukowskiI went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
Charles BukowskiThat was the trouble with being a writer, that was the main troubleโleisure time, excessive leisure time. You had to wait around for the buildup until you could write and while you were waiting you went crazy, and while you were going crazy you drank and the more you drank the crazier you got.
Charles BukowskiChristmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.
Charles BukowskiI once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die, where on my knees I prayed for LIGHT, I prayed for l*i*g*h*t, and praying crawled like a blind slug into the web where threads of wind stuck against my mind and I died of pity for Man, for myself, on a cross without nails, watching in fear as the pig belches in his sty, farts, blinks and eats.
Charles Bukowski