Top 100 Charles Bukowski Quotes
#1. There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life.
Charles Bukowski
#3. I dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer
Charles Bukowski
#4. I was feeling unfulfilled and, frankly, rather crappy about everything. 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 us weren't even doing little things.
Charles Bukowski
#6. I've found out why men sign their names to their works- not that they created them but more than the others did not.
Charles Bukowski
#8. God damn the geraniums! ... It was like trying to screw during an aerial attack.
Charles Bukowski
#11. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#13. I felt terrible. The poor had a right to fuck their way through their bad dreams. Sex and drink, and maybe love, was all they had.
Charles Bukowski
#15. I take much pleasure in being alone
but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.
Charles Bukowski
#16. I 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 Bukowski
#17. I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.
Charles Bukowski
#18. I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.
Charles Bukowski
#19. Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.
Charles Bukowski
#20. I think of two friens who advise me on various methods of suicide. what better proof of loving camaraderie?
Charles Bukowski
#21. Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on.
It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.
Charles Bukowski
#22. They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.
Charles Bukowski
#23. You're all there," she said. "What do you mean?" "I mean, I never met a man like you." "Oh, yeah?" "The others are only ten percent there or twenty percent, you're all there, all of you is very there, it's so different." "I don't know anything about it." "You're a hooker, you can hook women.
Charles Bukowski
#24. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.
Charles Bukowski
#25. Gathered around me were the weak instead of the strong, the ugly instead of the beautiful, the losers instead of the winners. It looked like it was my destiny to travel in their company through life. That didn't bother me so much as the fact that I seemed irresistible to these dull idiot fellows.
Charles Bukowski
#26. The bar was the best place to hide in. time came under your control, time to wade in, time to do nothing in. no guru was needed, no god. nothing expected but yourself and nothing lost to the unexpected.
Charles Bukowski
#27. She was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty
Charles Bukowski
#29. Still, I'm lucky: I feast on solitude, I will never miss the crowd. I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me. I sit in bed and wait for the whole thing to go one way or the other. just like everybody else.
Charles Bukowski
#31. We are a scene chalked out with the sick white brush of age
Charles Bukowski
#32. People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
Charles Bukowski
#33. I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.
Charles Bukowski
#34. The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.
Charles Bukowski
#35. but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
Charles Bukowski
#36. People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.
Charles Bukowski
#37. Maybe I'd be a bank robber. Some god-damned thing. Something with flare, fire. You only had one shot. Why be a window washer?
Charles Bukowski
#38. I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.
Charles Bukowski
#39. Most days go
nowhere
but the avoidance
of pain and
dissolution are
lovely.
Charles Bukowski
#40. Life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle -
Charles Bukowski
#41. I don't know why, but with each new woman it seemed like the first time, almost as if I had never been with a woman before.
Charles Bukowski
#42. Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.
Charles Bukowski
#44. I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
Charles Bukowski
#45. She pointed at me. I felt important. I had lost so many women to so many other guys that it felt good for the thing to be working the other way around.
Charles Bukowski
#46. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#47. I disliked them all immediately, sitting around acting clever and superior. They nullified each other. The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of writers. Like flies on the same turd.
Charles Bukowski
#49. Whiskey makes the heart beat faster
but it sure doesn't help the
mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just
from the deadly drone of
existence?
Charles Bukowski
#50. Lack of love. Sleep, then nightmare. Paper everywhere. Trivial bits of paper. Nothing ever done. Sure, sure, sure. Today I will walk in the sun. I will simply walk in the sun.
Charles Bukowski
#51. I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems.
Charles Bukowski
#52. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#53. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great. I
Charles Bukowski
#54. And then there are some who
believe that old
relationships can be
revived and made new
again.
but please
if you feel that way
don't phone
don't write
don't arrive
Charles Bukowski
#55. A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated. - from 'Cows in Art Class
Charles Bukowski
#57. When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
Charles Bukowski
#59. Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.
Charles Bukowski
#60. We've each given the hours of our lives in dull rote jobs for other men's profit, and have been asked to be grateful for doing that.
Charles Bukowski
#61. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#63. Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.
Charles Bukowski
#65. I want so much that is not here and do not know
where to go.
Charles Bukowski
#66. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#67. I have sat in the dark here electric (haha) typer off lights out radio off drinking in the dark lighting cigarettes in the dark there was fire off the match we are all burning together burning brothers and sisters I like it I like it I like it.
Charles Bukowski
#68. I enjoy the bad things that are said about me. It enhances sales and makes me feel evil. I don't like to feel good 'cause I am good. But evil? Yes. It gives me another dimension.
Charles Bukowski
#69. The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.
Charles Bukowski
#70. Don't you wish you were Charles Bukowski? I can paint to. lift weights. and my little girl think that I am god. then other times, it's not so good.
Charles Bukowski
#71. I stared at the phone. Deathly damned thing. But you needed it to call 911. You never knew.
Charles Bukowski
#74. The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Charles Bukowski
#75. She likes that and I like it too because to/make a thing true all you've/got to do is believe
Charles Bukowski
#76. Generally, I decided, it was better to wait, if you had any feeling for the individual. If you hated her right off, it was better to fuck her right off; if you didn't, it was better to wait, then fuck her and hate her later on.
Charles Bukowski
#77. 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?
Charles Bukowski
#79. So, 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 Bukowski
#80. The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
Charles Bukowski
#81. If you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
Charles Bukowski
#83. For me
obedience to another is the decay of self.
for though every being is similar
each being is different
and to herd our differences
under one law
degrades each self.
Charles Bukowski
#85. This will never leave me: that I had love and love died; a photo and a piece of tape is not much, I have learned late, but give me 14 days or 14 years, I will kill any man who would touch or take whatever's left.
Charles Bukowski
#86. Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.
Charles Bukowski
#89. So many people are doomed by their ambition and their gathered intelligence, their bank account and savings and loan intelligence. If there is any secret to life, that secret is not to try. Let it come to you: women, dogs, death, and creation.
Charles Bukowski
#90. The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.
Charles Bukowski
#91. I do think that poetry is important though, if you don't strive at it, if you don't fill it full of stars and falseness.
Charles Bukowski
#93. Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
Charles Bukowski
#94. There is nothing worse than being broke and having your woman leave you. Nothing to drink, no job,just the walls, sitting there staring at the walls and thinking. That's how women got back at you, but it hurt and weakened them too. Or so I like to believe.
Charles Bukowski
#96. I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
Charles Bukowski
#97. But I gave the girl my address and phone number, thinking we might make it on the springs. (Harriet, you never arrived.)
Charles Bukowski
#99. We've died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.
Charles Bukowski
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