Charles Bukowski Quotes: 72

• Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.

• It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.

• Do you hate people?”“I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.

  Barfly

• An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

• Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.

• what matters most is how well you walk through the fire

• 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.

• My ambition is handicapped by laziness

  Factotum

• You have to die a few times before you can reallylive.

  The People Look Like Flowers at Last

• To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

• That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

  Women

• I wanted the whole world or nothing.

  Post Office

• My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.~ Falsely yours

• The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

• there are worse thingsthan being alonebut it often takesdecades to realize thisand most often when you doit's too lateand there's nothing worsethan too late

• If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose

• Find what you love and let it kill you.

• Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

• Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.some lose both and become accepted

• I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.

  Love is a Dog from Hell

• being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.

  Women

• 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.

  Tales of Ordinary Madness

• Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

• the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

  Tales of Ordinary Madness

• those who escape hellhowevernever talk aboutitand nothing muchbothers themafterthat.

• A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

  The People Look Like Flowers at Last

• There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get outbut I'm too tough for him,I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

• Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

• there is a place in the heart thatwill never be filleda spaceand even during thebest momentsandthe greatest timestimeswe will know itwe will know itmore thaneverthere is a place in the heart thatwill never be filledandwe will waitandwaitin that space.

• Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

• Life's as kind as you let it be.

  Hot Water Music

• great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it.

  The People Look Like Flowers at Last

• We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

• It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.

  Pulp

• I drive around the streetsan inch away from weeping,ashamed of my sentimentality andpossible love.

  Love is a Dog from Hell

• some moments are nice, some arenicer, some are even worthwritingabout.

  War All the Time

• I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.

• It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun

  Factotum

• I wish to weepbut sorrow isstupid.I wish to believebut belief is agraveyard.

  What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

• nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.

• in this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck

  Love is a Dog from Hell

• He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well,"I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

• my mother, poor fish,wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times aweek, 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 thesaddest smile I ever saw

• 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.

• the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever

  Love is a Dog from Hell

• To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end.

• She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.

• unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it

• Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.

  What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

• That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.

  Factotum

• Dying should come easy:like a freight train youdon't hear whenyour back isturned.

  The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems

• be it peace or happinesslet it enfold you

• when I am feelinglowall i have to do iswatch my catsand mycouragereturns

• When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.

• People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.

  Factotum

• writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

  The Last Night of the Earth Poems

• having nothing to struggleagainstthey have nothing to strugglefor.

  You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

• when we were kidslaying around the lawnon ourbellieswe often talkedabouthowwe'd like todieandwe allagreed on thesamething;we'd alllike to diefucking(althoughnone of ushaddone anyfucking)and nowthatwe are hardlykidsany longerwe think moreabouthownot todieandalthoughwe'rereadymost ofuswouldprefer todo italoneunder thesheetsnowthatmost ofushave fuckedour livesaway.

  You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

• I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me.

  The Last Night of the Earth Poems

• take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning

• the worst thing,"he told me,"is bitterness, people end up sobitter.

  You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

• great books are the ones we need

  The Last Night of the Earth Poems

• and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical senseand are not easy to fool with laughter

• girlsplease give yourbodies and yourlivestothe young menwhodeserve thembesidesthere isno wayI would welcometheintolerabledullsenseless hellyou would bringmeandI wish youluckin bedandoutbut notinminethankyou.

  You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

• There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

  Notes of a Dirty Old Man

• I paid, got up, walkedto the door, openedit.I heard the mansay, "that guy'snuts."out on the street Iwalked northfeelingcuriouslyhonored.

  You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

• Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.

  Ham on Rye

• if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

  Love is a Dog from Hell

• sometimes when everything seems atits worstwhen all conspiresand gnawsand the hours, days, weeksyearsseem wasted – stretched there upon my bedin the darklooking upward at the ceilingi get what many will consider anobnoxious thought:it’s still nice to beBukowski.

  You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

• Mëso të mos e shkatërrosh me fjalë atë çfarë ke ndërtuar me heshtje.

• You could sit in there all day drinking coffee and they never asked you to leave no matter how bad you looked. They just asked the bums not to bring their wine and drink it there. Places like that gave you hope when there wasn´t much hope.

  Ham on Rye

• Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.