Charles Bukowski Quotes

Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.

beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks average but there is genius in their hatred there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you to kill anybody not wanting solitude not understanding solitude they will attempt to destroy anything that differs from their own not being able to create art they will not understand art they will consider their failure as creators only as a failure of the world

she is no longer the beautiful woman she was. she sends photos of herself sitting upon a rock by the ocean alone and damned. I could have had her once. I wonder if she thinks I could have saved her?

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

I had no Freedom. I had nothing.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.

With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.

A yet women -good women- frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price.

I am a poem. There is no way out.

That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.

some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.

Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.

love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.

I sit here drunk now. I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here without committing murder or being murdered; without having ended up in the madhouse. as I drink alone again tonight my soul despite all the past agony thanks all the gods who were not there for me then.

I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.

Careful poetry and careful people live only long enough to die safely.

Only the boring get bored

I kept telling myself that all the women in the world weren´t whores, just mine.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it.

It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.

Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.

I hope that death contains less than this.

The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.

...in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.

Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with.

take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.

Without literature, life is hell.

Look, let me put it this way: with me, you’re number one and there isn’t even a number two.

terror finally becomes almost bearable but never quite terror creeps like a cat crawls like a cat across my mind

An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.

Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have love

One more drink and you're dead. This is no way to talk to a suicide head.

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.

We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

It's hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it's - don't. I'm going to send out for some fried chicken.

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.

I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

…He was always high on drugs. I was not a drug man, but in case I wanted to hide from myself for a few days, I knew I could get anything I wanted from him.

I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt

magic persists without us no matter what we may do to try to spoil it