Top 100 Bukowski's Quotes
#1. My favourite books are Charles Bukowski's 'Post Office' and 'Women.'
Alex Pettyfer
#2. You like that poet, Bukowski?" "Yeah," I answered, confused. "Don't try." "I don't understand." "That's what it says, on Bukowski's grave.
Kami Garcia
#3. We drank everything his favorite poet drank-Bukowski- and like Bukowski's women, I matched him drink for drink.
We drank each other blind.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
Charles Bukowski
#8. But starvation,
unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's
soul was rooted in his stomach
Bukowski
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. There's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate.
Charles Bukowski
#18. That's when I first learned that it wasn't enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.
Charles Bukowski
#19. Baby, that's grammar school. Any damn fool can beg up some
kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working. Out
here we call it hustling. I'd like to be a good hustler.
Charles Bukowski
#20. Escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she'll embrace you then when she's satisfied she'll kill you still in her embrace and suck the blood from you.
Charles Bukowski
#21. Is that death
stalking me
now?
no, it's only my cat,
this
time.
Charles Bukowski
#22. People need me. I fill them. If they can't see me for a while they get desperate, they get sick. But if I see them too often I get sick. It's hard to feed without getting fed.
Charles Bukowski
#24. 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
#25. Of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse
Charles Bukowski
#26. Just heard a commercial
which told me
Farmer John smokes his own
bacon.
now, there's one tough
son of a
bitch.
Charles Bukowski
#27. 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
#28. What? You'd dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?
That's when you need a drink the most.
Charles Bukowski
#29. Well, we all have our sharks, I'm sure, and there's only one way to get them off before they hack and nibble you to death - stop feeding them; they will find other bait; you fattened them the last dozen times around - now set them out to sea.
Charles Bukowski
#31. If I'm intelligent at all I'll stay out of the woman game. But it's difficult. I had four years of perfect solitude and strength and then one knocked on the door ...
Charles Bukowski
#34. That's how it is with books, isn't it: They're not in a hurry. They'll wait for you till you're ready. People empty me. I have to go away to refill.
Charles Bukowski
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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.
Charles Bukowski
#38. 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
#39. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.
Charles Bukowski
#41. What's the easiest fucking thing to take?" I asked him. "Journalism. Those journalism majors don't do anything." "O.K., I'll be a journalist.
Charles Bukowski
#42. I want to be with you. It's as simple, and as complicated as that.
Charles Bukowski
#43. But right now it's Bob Dylan Bob Dylan Bob Dylan all the way.
Charles Bukowski
#44. Van Gogh cut off his ear
gave it to a
prostitute
who flung it away in
extreme
disgust.
Van, whores don't want
ears
they want
money.
I guess that's why you were
such a great
painter: you
didn't understand
much
else.
Charles Bukowski
#45. You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn't deceive anybody. It's the deceivers who make you feel bad.
Charles Bukowski
#46. I can sit down and vomit on the
keys
but it's my
vomit.
it's better than sitting in a room
with 3 or 4 people and
their pianos.
this is my piano
and it is better than theirs.
Charles Bukowski
#47. I write as a function. Without it I would fall ill and die. It's as much a part of one as the liver or intestine, and just about as glamorous.
Charles Bukowski
#48. Hey, Bubu, a bottle of good French wine ... Sip it slowly, do you most good. You'll sleep. Be happy. And if you want to come downstairs, dance and sing, talk, ok. Do what you want. Here's the wine.
Charles Bukowski
#49. Forgive me, I guess I am off in the head, but I mean, except for a quickie piece of ass it wouldn't matter to me if all the people in the world died. Yes, I know it's not nice. But I'd be as contended as a snail; it was, after all, the people who had made me unhappy.
Charles Bukowski
#50. If I stop writing I am dead. And that's the only way I'll stop: dead.
Charles Bukowski
#51. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little.
Charles Bukowski
#52. I felt like a still live fish on ice in a butcher's counter on Friday morning.
- On Cats
Bukowski
#53. It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
Charles Bukowski
#54. What do you do all day?
I just stay in bed.
That's awful.
No, it's nice. I like it.
Charles Bukowski
#55. But it's all the little people, Buk, the twenty-five-buck-a-week guys who gave up everything to keep the thing going. The guys with cardboard in their shoes. The guys who slept on the floor.
Charles Bukowski
#56. There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.
Charles Bukowski
#59. To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
Charles Bukowski
#60. Often it takes a lifetime to learn how to
react to certain critical situations.
it's worth waiting for the arrival of maturity
and confidence.
try it sometime and see how delightful it is to feel powerful and
alive.
Charles Bukowski
#61. What's so nice about laying in bed all day?" "I don't have to see anybody." "You like that?" "Oh, yes.
Charles Bukowski
#62. Ya got cigarettes?" she asks. "Yes," I say,
"I got cigarettes." "Matches?" she asks.
"Enough to burn Rome." "Whiskey?"
"Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River
of pain." "You drunk?" "Not yet.
Charles Bukowski
#64. There are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late
Charles Bukowski
#65. It's good to have things done with when they don't work it's also good not to hate or even forget the person you've failed with.
Charles Bukowski
#66. Me working and you laying around. All the neighbors think I am supporting you." "Hell, I worked and you laid around." "That's different. You're a man, I'm a woman." "Oh, I didn't know that. I thought you bitches were always screaming for equal rights?
Charles Bukowski
#68. There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him.
Charles Bukowski
#69. We do not abandon ship. I say, as corny as it may sound, through the strength and spirit and fire and dare and gamble of a few men in a few ways we can save the carcass of humanity from drowning. No light goes out until it goes out. Let's fight as men, not rats. Period. No further addition.
Charles Bukowski
#71. Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay. You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it's for something else.
Charles Bukowski
#72. People see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.
Charles Bukowski
#74. It's a lonely time, she sings, and you're not
mine and it makes me feel so bad,
this thing of being me ...
Charles Bukowski
#76. According to my figures I've only had 2500 pieces of ass but I've watched 12500 horse races, and if I have any advice to anybody, it's this: take up watercolor painting.
Charles Bukowski
#77. It's all overrated, man. Sex is only a great thing if you're not getting any.
Charles Bukowski
#78. 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
#79. That's your response to everything: drink?"
"No, that's my response to nothing.
Charles Bukowski
#80. I get 75 letters a month. If i answered them that's all I would ever do.
Charles Bukowski
#81. Mainly thinking, well,
I'm still alive
and have the ability to expel wastes from my body
and poems.
and as long as that's happening
I have the ability to handle
betrayal
loneliness
hangnail
clap
and the economic reports in the
financial section.
Charles Bukowski
#82. Life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle -
Charles Bukowski
#83. Sometimes a man doesn't know what to do about things and sometimes it's best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.
Charles Bukowski
#84. Suicide fails as you get older:
there's less and less to kill.
Charles Bukowski
#85. She's half-insane, looking for an out; she's hard, she's scared, she's been fooled, taken, abused, used, over-used ...
but, under all that, to me she's the flower, I see her as she was before she was ruined by the lies: theirs and hers.
Charles Bukowski
#86. My hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best
for me.
Charles Bukowski
#88. I felt that even the sun belonged to my father, that I had no right to it because it was shining upon my father's house. I was like his roses, something that belonged to him and not to me.
Charles Bukowski
#89. It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse ... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies ... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.
Charles Bukowski
#90. Do you believe in bravery?
I like to see it anywhere, in animals, birds, reptiles, humans.
Why?
Why? It makes me feel good. It's a matter of style in the face of no chance at all.
Charles Bukowski
#91. Let it die. Let there be a new beginning. It's awful. Goodnight.
Charles Bukowski
#92. Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can't break out of the movie. And it's a bad one.
Charles Bukowski
#93. Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.
Charles Bukowski
#94. Naturally, we are all caught in
downmoods, it's a matter of
chemical imbalance
and an existence
which, at times,
seems to forbid
any real chance at
happiness.
Charles Bukowski
#95. There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
Charles Bukowski
#96. It's hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it's - don't. I'm going to send out for some fried chicken.
Charles Bukowski
#97. It's a f*** you world. Well, keep it going anyhow, what the hell.
Charles Bukowski
#98. there's all that time to eat drink and wait on death like everybody else.
Charles Bukowski
#99. There's too much coldness in the world," I told her. "If people would only talk things out together it would help.
Charles Bukowski
#100. So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all.
Charles Bukowski
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