Charles Bukowski Quotes

People just don't know how to write down a simple easy line. It's difficult for them; it's like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning - not many can do it.

Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don't forget indigestion. I wasn't different from anyone else: There sat the 18-pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.

there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate.

I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.

I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have. Let's drink more wine!

pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.

It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn't always there.

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.

I could scream down 90 mountains to less than dust if only one living human had eyes in the head and heart in the body, but there is no chance, my god, no chance. rat with rat dog with dog hog with hog, play the piano drunk listen to the drunk piano, realize the myth of mercy stand still as even a child's voice snarls and we have not been fooled, it was only that we wanted to believe.

The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.

People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.

places to hunt places to hide are getting harder to find, and pet canaries and goldfish too, did you notice that?

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard

Banion wondered which was worse - being sodomized by aliens, or having to sit through two hours of Charles Ives.

It’s not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there’s no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.

More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets ... are interesting?

What were you going to do tonight?" "I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff." "Who's that?" "A dead Russian.

I think I need a drink.' 'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

the masses are everywhere they know how to do things: they have sane and deadly angers for sane and deadly things.

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.

my greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II.

I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible--- not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance: trying to connect.

If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.

If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.

To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end.

When Ginsburg is at the top of his game you might as well put down your toys and listen.

it's better to be happy...if you can..!!

I've found out why men sign their names to their works- not that they created them but more than the others did not.

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.

they simply never understand, do they, that sometimes solitude is one of the most beautiful things on earth?

People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.

Sundays kill more people than bombs.

I have a face like a washrag. I sing love songs and carry steel. I would rather die than cry. I can't stand hounds can't live without them. I hang my head against the white refrigerator and want to scream like the last weeping of life forever but I am bigger than the mountains.

human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.

Let' em learn or let' em die

Well, the rain had stopped but the pain was still there.

To be young is the only religion.

This incompleteness is all we have.

It's just that the grape has me down.