Charles Bukowski Quotes

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

I felt I had to win. It seemed very important. I didn't know why it was important and I kept thinking, why do I think this is so important? And another part of me answered, just because it is.

He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare.

I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.

The pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how--usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.

Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.

Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren't sure of was if we had any.

And if there is anybody out there who is crazy enough to want to become a writer, I'd say go ahead, spit in the eye of the sun, hit those keys, it's the best madness going, the centuries need help, the species cry for light and gamble and laughter. Give it to them. There are enough words for all of us.

New Year's Eve always terrifies me.

one more creature dizzy with love

There's music in everything, even defeat

I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut

I am a series of small victories and large defeats.

Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.

Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that

there must be a way. surely there must be a way that we have not yet thought of. who put this brain inside of me? it cries it demands it says that there is a chance. it will not say "no.

When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.

There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and all that...but I'm not the book, see? I'm the guy who wrote it, but I don't want them to come up and throw roses on me or anything. I want them to let me breathe.

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

the people are the biggest horror show on earth, have been for centuries.

There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.

It was like any other relationship, there was jealousy on both sides, there were split-ups and reconciliations. There were also fragmented moments of great peace and beauty. I often tried to get away from her and she tried to get away from me but it was difficult: Cupid, in his strange way, was really there.

I could never accept life as it was, I could never gobble down all its poisons bu there were parts, tenuous magic parts open for the asking.

My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover. ~ Falsely yours

People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.

I do not like to work and have no trade but i do like to eat, so this is basic, the basic training of slaves to fear.

hate contains truth. beauty is a facade.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out.

Her violence frightened me. She always claimed that I was the jealous one, and I was often jealous, but when I saw things working against me I simply became disgusted and withdrew. Lydia was different. She reacted. She was the Head Cheerleader at the Game of Violence.

God is a lonely place without steak.

… and we are in bed together laughing and we don’t care about anything.

I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave ma a relaxex manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.

I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better. just like, at times, I needed that graveyard.

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.

My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.

If you want to create, you'll create.

Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.

The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.

for a man of 55 who didn't get laid until he was 23 and not very often until he was 50 I think that I should stay listed via Pacific Telephone until I get as much as the average man has had

and love is a word used too much and much too soon.