Charles Bukowski Quotes

Sometimes I get too exhausted to even feel bad

That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying.

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

I can't blame her. but wonder why she's here with me? where are the other guys? how can you be lucky? having someone the others have abandoned?

I'm not the cruel type, but they are, and that's the secret.

Long before I became 'rich and famous' I just sat round drinking wine and staring at the walls.

If you let them kill you, they will

I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn't have much to argue about.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on.

and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it

Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.

I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.

What? You’d dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?” That’s when you need a drink the most.

If I'm an ass, I should say so. If I don't, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.

You've got to rise from the floor alone or fall back alone.

It’s the order of things: each one gets a taste of honey then the knife.

I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.

we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.

she was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty

And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive? I don't know. I'm already tired.

if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.

morning night and noon the traffic moves through and the murder and treachery of friends and lovers and all the people move through you. pain is the joy of knowing the unkindest truth that arrives without warning. life is being alone death is being alone. even the fools weep morning night and noon.

That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.

When I'm drinking around people, I tend to get silly or pugnacious or wild, which can cause problems.

I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.

You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.

i am with the roots of flowers entwined, entombed sending up my passionate blossoms as a flight of rockets and argument; wine churls my throat, above me feet walk upon my brain, monkies fall from the sky clutching photographs of the planets, but i seek only music and the leisure of my pain

If I stop writing I am dead. And that's the only way I'll stop: dead.

I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.

Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.

I was only kidding about the hundred," she says. oh," I say, "what will it cost me?" she lights her cigarette with my lighter and looks at me through the flame: her eyes tell me. look," I say, "I don't think I can ever pay that price again.

If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.

I have loved you woman as surely as I have named you rust and sand and nylon.

It’s never quite right, all the things we are taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we die, all the lives we live.

I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.

Figuring the average poet starts at 16, I am 23.

I thought you were sane," I said, "but you're just as crazy as the rest of them.

Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.

What's wrong with assholes, baby?

Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth - alongside of me.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?