Top 100 Bukowski Life Quotes
#1. Once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a roomful of people who only helped you when you looked at them, listened to them. this was one of those magic times. I knew it.
Charles Bukowski
#2. Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.
Charles Bukowski
#3. No life anywhere, no life in this town or this place or in this weary existence
Charles Bukowski
#4. The world is better without
them.
only the plants and the animals are
true comrades.
I drink to them and with
them.
Charles Bukowski
#5. The 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 Bukowski
#6. It's like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking.
Charles Bukowski
#7. The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable
Charles Bukowski
#8. ...there comes a time in each man's life when he must choose to stand or run. I choose to stand.
Charles Bukowski
#9. Having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for.
Charles Bukowski
#10. One doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine.
Charles Bukowski
#11. I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm bringing the dead back to life ...
Charles Bukowski
#13. 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
#14. Waiting
in a life full of little stories
for a death to come
Charles Bukowski
#15. I wasn't lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.
Charles Bukowski
#16. I could never accept
life as it was,
I could never gobble
down all its
poisons
bu there were parts,
tenuous magic parts
open for the
asking.
Charles Bukowski
#18. I decided to stay in bed until noon. Maybe by then half the world would be dead and it would only be half as hard to take.
Charles Bukowski
#20. The worst thing," he told me,
"is bitterness, people end up so
bitter.
Charles Bukowski
#21. Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
Charles Bukowski
#22. It wasn't my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.
Charles Bukowski
#23. Love is not a candle burning down. Life is. And love and life are not the same or else Love, having choice, nobody would ever die.
Charles Bukowski
#24. That boy was ready for his life to come, he would undoubtedly be highly successful, the lying little prick.
Charles Bukowski
#25. You are good but you are too emotional
the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,study it and put it to sleep in the abstract.
is there anything less abstract
than dying everyday and
on the last day?
Charles Bukowski
#26. I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.
Charles Bukowski
#27. My laughter was all there inside of me waiting to roar out: HAHAHAHAHA, o my god o my HAHAHAHA. It felt so good when it happened. Dee Dee knew something about life. Dee Dee knew that what happened to one happened to most of us. Our lives were not so different - even though we liked to think so.
Charles Bukowski
#28. Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I've got several degrees. Call me Mr.
Charles Bukowski
#29. I was like a turd that drew flies instead of like a flower that butterflies and bees desired. I wanted to live alone,I felt best being alone, cleaner,,,
Charles Bukowski
#30. I paid, got up, walked
to the door, opened
it.
I heard the man
say, "that guy's
nuts."
out on the street I
walked north
feeling
curiously
honored.
Charles Bukowski
#32. A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.
Charles Bukowski
#33. Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.
Charles Bukowski
#34. Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
Charles Bukowski
#35. I realized that her life
her feelings for things
had been ruined
along the way
and that I was no more than a
temporary
companion
Charles Bukowski
#36. People who eat 3 meals a day throughout life
have never really
tasted
Food ...
Charles Bukowski
#37. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought.
Charles Bukowski
#38. But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. it kept me from being an industrialist. it allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. it gave me space, a pause. it helped me to write this.
Charles Bukowski
#39. Life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle -
Charles Bukowski
#40. I feel no grief for being called something
which
I am not;
in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good
back rub
Charles Bukowski
#42. They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.
Charles Bukowski
#43. Henry Chinaski, the principal said over the microphone. And I walked forward. There was no applause. The one kindly soul in the audience gave two or three clasps.
Charles Bukowski
#44. When you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.
Charles Bukowski
#45. It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun
Charles Bukowski
#46. T was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn't much left you could depend on.
Charles Bukowski
#47. 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
#48. I like to prowl ordinary places
and taste the people-
from a distance.
Charles Bukowski
#49. I'm also a book nerd so aside from my life and my opinions, you could say my lyrics are inspired in some sense by the writings of Guy Debord, John Berryman, Georges Bataille, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Bukowski, Artaud, Derrick Jensen and bunch of other people.
Dominic Owen Mallary
#50. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
Charles Bukowski
#51. That's ONE thing that's wrong with intellectuals and writers - they don't feel a hell of a lot except their own comfort or their own pain. which is normal but shitty.
Charles Bukowski
#52. When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
Charles Bukowski
#54. She slammed the door and
was gone.
I looked at the closed door
and at the doorknob
and strangely
I didn't feel
alone.
Charles Bukowski
#56. A life can change in a tenth of
a second.
or sometimes it can take
70
years.
Charles Bukowski
#57. Only the poor knew the meaning of life; the rich and the safe had to guess.
Charles Bukowski
#58. With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.
Charles Bukowski
#59. 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
#60. Presumed that the reader was as fascinated by her life as she was - which was a deadly mistake. The other deadly mistakes she had made were too numerous to mention.
Charles Bukowski
#61. Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski.
Sandra Tsing Loh
#62. 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
#63. Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
Charles Bukowski
#64. If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it's your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.
Charles Bukowski
#65. Some men never
die
and some men never
live
but we're all alive
tonight.
Charles Bukowski
#66. In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.
Charles Bukowski
#68. There are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
Charles Bukowski
#69. 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
#70. I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something.
Charles Bukowski
#71. age is no crime but the shame of a deliberately wasted life among so many deliberately wasted lives is.
Charles Bukowski
#72. 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
#74. to ignore life at the proper time takes a special wisdom: like a Happy New Year to you all.
Charles Bukowski
#75. 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
#76. She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.
Charles Bukowski
#77. I have been treated better than I should have been
not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.
Charles Bukowski
#78. I'm not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay, who isn't?
Charles Bukowski
#79. I like to prowl ordinary places.
I feel sorry for us all or glad for us
all
caught alive together
and awkward in that way.
there's nothing better than the joke
of us
the seriousness of us
the dullness of us
Charles Bukowski
#80. I went from barrel to barrel. It was magic. Why hadn't someone told me? With this, life was great, a man was perfect, nothing could touch him.
Charles Bukowski
#82. I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
Charles Bukowski
#84. The lies of centuries, the lies of love,
the lies of Socrates and Blake and Christ
will be your bedmates and tombstones
in a death that will never end.
Charles Bukowski
#86. Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing.
Charles Bukowski
#87. To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
Charles Bukowski
#88. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#89. There is always somebody about to ruin your day, if not your life.
Charles Bukowski
#90. Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.
Charles Bukowski
#93. Being a common laborer all my life at poor and underpaid jobs, I had worked with more black men, known more black men, drank with more black men, fought with more black men than any theoretical liberal with books jammed between the ears.
Charles Bukowski
#94. I was getting depressed. My life wasn't going anywhere. I needed something, the flashing of lights, glamour, some damn thing. And here I was, talking to the dead. I finished my first drink. The second was ready.
Charles Bukowski
#95. Life wore a man out, wore a man thin.
Tomorrow would be a better day.
Charles Bukowski
#96. They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.
Charles Bukowski
#99. 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
#100. You were the only one
who understood
the futility of the
arrangement of
life;
all the others were only
displeased with
trivial segments,
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much.
Charles Bukowski
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