Charles Bukowski Quotes

I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn't want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn't understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity

Dog is much admired by Man because he believes in the hand which feeds him. A perfect set-up. For 13 cents a day you've got a hired killer who thinks you are god. A dog can't tell a Nazi from a Republican from a Commie from a Democrat and, many times, neither can I.

Love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons.

It began as a mistake.

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, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals.

I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.

I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, "crazy." But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.

They looked as if nothing had ever touched them--all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheen of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or even gotten a traffic ticket. Skimmed-milk jollies, the whole bunch.

I suppose like others I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tubs and wished to drown

Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They're always wrong.

there's no clarity. there was never meant to be clarity.

she’s mad, but she’s magic.

There's a small balcony here, the door is open and I can see the lights of the cars on the Harbor Freeway south, they never stop, that roll of lights, on and on. All those people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't.

we had such tremendous fun and much agony together for some years

It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated." - from 'Cows in Art Class

If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.

It was like a church in there as only the truly lost sit in bars on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 a.m.

Early evening traffic was beginning to clog the avenue with cars. The sun slanted down behind him. Harry glanced at the drivers of the cars. They seemed unhappy. The world was unhappy. People were in the dark. People were terrified and disappointed. People were caught in traps. People were defensive and frantic. They felt as if their lives were being wasted. And they were right.

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.

Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking." -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

People empty me. I have to get away to refill.

Life's as kind as you let it be.

As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn't help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.

t was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn't much left you could depend on.

if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.

I knew exactly what I was doing: I was doing nothing. because I knew there was nothing to do.

I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?

"Baby," I said. "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me."

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

the whole world is caught in her glance and at last the universe is magnificent.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

A man who can beat the horses can do anything he makes up his mind to do.

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.

The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

That's what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.

the psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on