Top 100 Bukowski Charles Quotes
#1. The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy.
Charles Bukowski
#2. What a weary time those years were
to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.
Charles Bukowski
#3. There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.
Charles Bukowski
#6. you say you often feel this madness. what do you do when it comes upon you?
I write poetry.
is poetry madness?
non-poetry is madness.
what is madness?
madness is ugliness.
what is ugly?
to each man, something different.
Charles Bukowski
#7. So I drank every night after work, alone, up at my place and I had enough left for a day at the track on Saturday, and life was simple and without too much pain. Maybe without too much reason, but getting away from pain was reasonable enough.
Charles Bukowski
#9. Of course, you leave afterwards or get very drunk which is the same thing.
Charles Bukowski
#10. We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
Charles Bukowski
#11. The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.
Charles Bukowski
#12. There was something about funerals. It made you see things better. A funeral a day and I'd be rich.
Charles Bukowski
#13. Truth changes as men change, and when truth becomes stable men will become dead, and the insect and the fire and the flood will become truth.
Charles Bukowski
#15. Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.
Charles Bukowski
#16. It's as if he were hiding in there and I want to console him, say: I am sorry, poor fellow, but creation has its limits.
Charles Bukowski
#17. I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
Charles Bukowski
#18. Daddy,' 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 Bukowski
#19. 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
#20. Erections, Ejaculations,Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.
Charles Bukowski
#21. I just want a hot cup of coffee,black,and I don't want to hear about your troubles.
Charles Bukowski
#22. I only want the sky
to burn me more and more
burn me out
so that the sun begins at
6 in the morning
and goes past midnight
Charles Bukowski
#23. Is there any wonder why the world is where it's at now? just notice the creature sitting near you in a movie house or standing ahead of you in a supermarket line. or giving a State of the Union Address. that the gods have let us go on this long this badly.
Charles Bukowski
#25. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
Charles Bukowski
#26. Living was easy - all you had to do was let go. And have a little money. Let the other men fight the wars, let the other men go to jail.
Charles Bukowski
#27. I don't know if this is true to you but for me
sometimes it gets so bad
that anything else
say like
looking at a bird on an overhead
power line
seems as great as a Beethoven symphony.
then you forget it and you're back
again.
Charles Bukowski
#30. There's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate.
Charles Bukowski
#31. Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.
Charles Bukowski
#32. Although looked down upon, the idiots seemed to have the more peaceful lives: nothing was expected of them.
Charles Bukowski
#33. I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something.
Charles Bukowski
#35. And as the worms pant for your bones,
I would so like to tell you
that this happens to bears and elephants
Charles Bukowski
#36. I reached over, opened it in the middle, and began reading Tolstoy's War and Peace. Nothing had changed. It was still a lousy book.
Charles Bukowski
#37. Understand me. I'm not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.
Charles Bukowski
#38. I don't think I'll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.
Charles Bukowski
#39. I am satisfied
with my aggressive nature
as I tickle death
under the
armpits.
Charles Bukowski
#40. Look, the reason is security, a subconscious need for security. I had a rotten childhood. Two bottles at once fills a void that needs filling. Maybe. I'm not sure.
Charles Bukowski
#41. Don't be ashamed of anything; I guess God meant it all like locks on doors.
Charles Bukowski
#42. And there I was, 225 pounds, perpetually lost and confused, short legs, ape-like upper body, all chest, no neck, head too large, blurred eyes, hair uncombed, 6 feet of geek, waiting for her.
Charles Bukowski
#44. age is no crime but the shame of a deliberately wasted life among so many deliberately wasted lives is.
Charles Bukowski
#45. Maybe she hadn't saved the world but she had made a major improvement.
Charles Bukowski
#46. The laughter of the mutilated who still need love, and her blessed eyes run deep into her head like mountain springs far in and cool and good.
Charles Bukowski
#49. God damn the geraniums! ... It was like trying to screw during an aerial attack.
Charles Bukowski
#50. Sweet Christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.
Charles Bukowski
#51. Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.
Charles Bukowski
#52. Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
Charles Bukowski
#53. The 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 Bukowski
#56. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun.
Charles Bukowski
#57. A man can be old and a fool
many are
a man can be young and wise
few are
Charles Bukowski
#58. The poet, as a rule, is a half-man - a sissy, not a real person, and he is in no shape to lead real men in matters of blood, or courage.
Charles Bukowski
#59. There are times when we should, remember, the strange courage, of the second-rate who refuse to quit, when the nights, are black and long and sleepless, and the days are without, end.
Charles Bukowski
#61. There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life.
Charles Bukowski
#62. In this land some of us fuck more than
we die but most of us die
better than we fuck
Charles Bukowski
#64. She knew what she wanted and it wasn't / me. / I know more women like that than any / other kind.
Charles Bukowski
#65. Modern women ... they don't sew your pockets ... forget that.
Charles Bukowski
#66. Something had happened. The bath towels knew it, the bathtub and the toilet knew it. My father turned and walked out the door. He knew it. It was my last beating. From him.
Charles Bukowski
#67. I am sad for the dead and I am sad for the living
but not for my 5 cats
Charles Bukowski
#68. The hangover was brutal but he didn't mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, someplace good.
Charles Bukowski
#69. Dog is much admired by Man because he believes in the hand which feeds him. A perfect set-up. For 13 cents a day you've got a hired killer who thinks you are god. A dog can't tell a Nazi from a Republican from a Commie from a Democrat and, many times, neither can I.
Charles Bukowski
#70. I am going to start selling air in dark orange bags marked: moon-blooms
Charles Bukowski
#72. I'm too careless. I don't put out enough effort. I'm tired.
Charles Bukowski
#73. My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
Charles Bukowski
#74. I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.
Charles Bukowski
#75. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#76. I dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer
Charles Bukowski
#77. If you get married they think you're
finished
and if you are without a woman they think you're
incomplete.
Charles Bukowski
#79. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#80. 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
#82. If I could only make her fall in love with me. Pretend to be a writer and just fuck her and have her cook for me. I would never have to write I'd just pretend.
Charles Bukowski
#83. I didn't like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it - I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank. I was a lunatic.
Charles Bukowski
#84. My mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw
Charles Bukowski
#87. When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row."
"There are some real weirdos down there."
"They're everywhere.
Charles Bukowski
#89. The area dividing the brain and the soul
Is affected in many ways by experience
Some lose all mind and become soul:
insane.
Some lose all soul and become mind:
intellectual.
Some lose both and become:
accepted.
Charles Bukowski
#90. Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.
Charles Bukowski
#92. Everything was eternally dreary, dismal, damned. Even the weather was insolent and bitchy.
Charles Bukowski
#93. to ignore life at the proper time takes a special wisdom: like a Happy New Year to you all.
Charles Bukowski
#94. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#95. You can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
Charles Bukowski
#96. I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.
Charles Bukowski
#97. Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.
Charles Bukowski
#98. I remember when each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord only go this rent when you had it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was full of promise.
Charles Bukowski
#99. We know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.
Charles Bukowski
#100. Well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you
Charles Bukowski
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