Charles Bukowski Quotes

When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. you’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

I had no feeling for the things so many others needed.

A man needed somebody. There wasn't anybody around, so you had to make up somebody, make him up to be like a man should be. It wasn't make-believe or cheating. The other way was make-believe and cheating: living your life without a man like him around.

... to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.

I will put on my shoes and shirt and get out of here - it'll be better for all of us.

They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.

‎"she’ mad but she’ magic. there’ no lie in her fire.

don't be ashamed of anything; I guess God meant it all like locks on doors.

i dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer

American women drove hard bargains and the ended up looking the worst for it. The few natural American women left were mostly in Texas and Louisiana.

young or old, good or bad, I don't think anything dies as slow and as hard as a writer.

Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing

It’s when you hide things that you choke on them.

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun

The human heart, as of course we all know is essentially good

my youth, one time, that time I knew even through the nothingness, it was a celebration of something not to do but only know.

I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.

I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.

I didn't like parties.I didn't know how to dance and people frightened me, especially people at parties. They attempted to be sexy and gay and witty and although they hoped they were good at it, they weren 't. They were bad at it. Their trying so hard only made it worse.

I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

life itself is not the miracle. that pain should be so constant, that's the miracle -

Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of use weren’t even doing little things. We were vegetables.

but right now it's Bob Dylan Bob Dylan Bob Dylan all the way.

great books are the ones we need

Each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.

Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?

I had decided against religion a couple of years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren't true, the fools were all the more foolish. What I need is a good doctor, I thought. You either lived or died.

they say that nothing is wasted: either that or it al is

Before my death I hope to obtain my life.

You were destroyed by what you befriended.

I once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die, where on my knees I prayed for LIGHT, I prayed for l*i*g*h*t, and praying crawled like a blind slug into the web where threads of wind stuck against my mind and I died of pity for Man, for myself, on a cross without nails, watching in fear as the pig belches in his sty, farts, blinks and eats.

There's nothing unusual about love.

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

people run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

soon I'll finish this 5th of Puerto Rican rum. in the morning I'll vomit and shower, drive back in, have a sandwich by 1 p.m., be back in my room by 2, stretched on the bed, waiting for the phone to ring, not answering, my holiday is an evasion, mt reasoning is not.

That's your response to everything: drink?" "No, that's my response to nothing.

No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.

Potential," I said, "doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

some men never die and some men never live but we're all alive tonight.

Love breaks my bones and I laugh

as the shadows assume shapes I fight the slow retreat now my once-promise dwindling dwindling now lighting new cigarettes pouring more drinks it has been a beautiful fight still is.