Charles Bukowski Quotations

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

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.

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

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

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

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.

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

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

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.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

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

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.

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

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

The courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.

I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?

Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn't have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink's office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.

I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.

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.

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

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.

I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It's just a little while, and then it burns away... Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They're always wrong.

As we live we all get caught and torn by various traps. Nobody escapes them. Some even live with them. The idea is to realize that a trap is a trap. If you are in one and you don't realize it, then you're finished.

Our disappointment sits between us.

I don't know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?

My flesh looked like it wasn't trying. It looked like it hated being part of me.

I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get the wax out of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I'd failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off of my reading glasses. There were ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time i shaved. I hadn't laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about, i got drunk.

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.

unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

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.

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.

Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start.

You have to die a few times before you can really live.

Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Let it die. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.

My body gnaws at me from one side and my spirit gnaws at me from the other.

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.

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.

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.

True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.

There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.

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.

People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.

If I never see you again I will always carry you inside outside on my fingertips and at brain edges and in centers centers of what I am of what remains.

I am a series of small victories and large defeats.

our bones like stems into the sky will forever cry victory

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.

More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote.

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

New Year's Eve always terrifies me.

I like women who haven’t lived with too many men. I don’t expect virginity but I simply prefer women who haven’t been rubbed raw by experience. There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk in their eyes in their laughter and in their gentle hearts. Women who have had too many men seem to choose the next one out of revenge rather than with feeling. When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. You’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.

as the spirit wanes the form appears

It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.

I have two rules. One is, never trust a man who smokes a pipe. The other is, never trust a man with shiny shoes.

People empty me. I have to get away to refill.

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

mercy, I think, doesn't the human race know anything about mercy?

Some men hope for revolution but when you revolt and set up your new government you find your new government is still the same old Papa, he has only put on a cardboard mask.

I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.

I feel no grief for being called something which I am not; in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good back rub

..few writers like other writers' works. The only time they like them is when they are dead or if they have been for a long time. Writers only like to sniff their own turds. I am one of those. I don't even like to talk to writers, look at them or worse, listen to them. And the worst is to drink with them, they slobber all over themselves, really look piteous, look like they are searching for the wing of the mother. I'd rather think about death than about other writers. Far more pleasant.

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.

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

I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.

A yet women -good women- frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price.

The blankets had fallen off and I stared down at her white back, the shoulder blades sticking out as if they wanted to grow into wings, poke through that skin. Little blades. She was helpless.

No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.

And don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.

The secret is writing down one simple line after another.

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.