if you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.
Charles BukowskiI 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.
Charles BukowskiPeople who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.
Charles BukowskiThe whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the "Watchtower" itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you're out, you're dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It's no wonder they keep getting busted.
Charles BukowskiWe do not abandon ship. I say, as corny as it may sound, through the strength and spirit and fire and dare and gamble of a few men in a few ways we can save the carcass of humanity from drowning. No light goes out until it goes out. Let's fight as men, not rats. Period. No further addition.
Charles Bukowskithere was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone.
Charles BukowskiHuman relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.
Charles BukowskiWhen I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.
Charles BukowskiArt is its own excuse, and it's either Art or it's something else. It's either a poem or a piece of cheese.
Charles Bukowskiit is good to be sitting some place in public at 2:30 in the afternoon without getting the flesh ripped from your bones.
Charles BukowskiSome people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.
Charles Bukowskithe last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.
Charles BukowskiIt will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.
Charles BukowskiSo, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.
Charles BukowskiTrouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job.
Charles BukowskiThe world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy.
Charles BukowskiI was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.
Charles Bukowskiall that I know is that I believe in the sound of music and the running of a horse. all else is squabble.
Charles BukowskiWhy did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?
Charles BukowskiGod knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.
Charles BukowskiSomebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it.
Charles BukowskiDrinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.
Charles BukowskiThe park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.
Charles BukowskiI like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.
Charles BukowskiThey never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.
Charles BukowskiDaddy,' my mother asked, 'aren’t we going to run out of gas?' No there’s plenty of god-damned gas.' Where are we going?' I’m going to get some god-damed oranges!
Charles BukowskiI wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.
Charles Bukowskiit seemed to me that I had never met another person on earth as discouraging to my happiness as my father. and it appeared that I had the same effect upon him.
Charles BukowskiOnce in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own tail, it swallowed and swallowed until it got halfway round, and there it stopped and there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own self. Some fix, that. We only have ourselves to go on, and it's enough.
Charles Bukowski