Charles Bukowski Quotes

Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience.

I am too sick to lay down the sidewalks frighten me the whole damned city frightens me, what I will become what I have become frightens me.

alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.

Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.

I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.

I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories.

The dog approached again, cautiously. I found the bologna sandwich, ripped off a chunk, wiped the cheap watery mustard off, then placed it on the sidewalk. The dog walked up to the bit of sandwich, put his nose to it, sniffed, then turned and walked off. This time he didn't look back. He accelerated down the street. No wonder I had been depressed all my life. I wasn't getting proper nourishment.

And it seems people should not build houses anymore it seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floors under electric lights without shades; it seems there is a lot to forget and a lot not to do and in drugstores, markets, bars, the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at night and look through this house and the house does not want to be built

I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It's just a little while, and then it burns away... Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

I used to lay drunk in alleys and I probably will again.Bukowski, who is he? I read about Bukowski and it doesn't seem like anything to do with me.

What good are you? What can you do? It has cost me a thousands of dollars to raise you, feed you, clothe you! Suppose I left you here on the street? Then what would you do?" "Catch butterflies

Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

as a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.

the tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.

People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.

To create art means to be crazy alone forever.

Love dries up, I thought as I walked back to the bathroom, even faster than sperm.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock

Beware Those Who Are ALWAYS READING BOOKS

when the phone rings I too would like to hear words that might ease some of this.

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

You have to lay down in the center of the action lay down and wait until it charges then you must get up face it get it before it gets you the whole process is more shy than vulnerable so lay down and wait sometimes it's ten minutes sometimes it's years sometimes it never arrives but you can't rush it push it there's no way to cheat or get a jump on it you have to lay down lay down and wait like an animal .

Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

that your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)

The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

and now sometimes I'm interviewed, they want to hear about life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed, shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,"look, look at this!" but they don't understand, they say something like,"you say you've been influenced by Celine?" no," I hold the cat up,"by what happens, by things like this, by this, by this!

nobody ever finds the one

Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.

we drove on and on, past little villages and both good things and bad things were happening to the people in those villages too, but I still was nothing but arms and ears and eyes and maybe there'd be either some good luck for me or more death tomorrow.

It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.

I didn't feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can't say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted.

Something that never happens anywhere at any time.

nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.

whiskey makes the heart beat faster but it sure doesn't help the mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just from the deadly drone of existence?

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

I was laying in bed one night and I thought 'I'll just quit - to hell with it.' And another little voice inside me said 'Don't quit - save that tiny little ember of spark.' And never give them that spark because as long as you have that spark, you can start the greatest fire again.

Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.

from the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.

how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

A woman is a full time job. You have to choose your profession.

when I was a boy I used to dream of becoming the village idiot. I used to lie in bed and imagine myself the happy idiot able to get food easily ...and easy sympathy, a planned confusion of not too much love or effort. some would claim that I have succeeded.

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they all made the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.

It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn't put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching. We had both been robbed.