Charles Bukowski Quotations | Page 3

she’s mad, but she’s magic.

Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.

I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn't want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn't understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

there is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day

I just want a hot cup of coffee,black,and I don’t want to hear about your troubles.

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.

My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.

I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.

I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don't forget indigestion. I wasn't different from anyone else: There sat the 18-pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.

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

bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it

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

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.

I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.

The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

A woman is a full time job. You have to choose your profession.

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.

love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.

There are no good wars or bad wars. The only thing bad about a war is to lose it. All wars have been fought for a so-called good Cause on both sides. But only the victor's Cause becomes history's Noble Cause. It's not a matter of who is right or who is wrong, it's a matter of who has the best generals and the better army!

LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.

I don't think I'll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.

He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare.

It’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?

I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn't have much to argue about.

Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.

It began as a mistake.

Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.

Well, we lost it, and that’s all there is to that.

Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateurs drunks, the bores.

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.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

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.

I kept telling myself that all the women in the world weren´t whores, just mine.

I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even stupidly happy almost without cause and left alone I am mostly content.

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

pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand -- and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know ...

I am a poem. There is no way out.

purple does something strange to me

hate contains truth. beauty is a facade.

If you want to create, you'll create...

I will put on my shoes and shirt and get out of here - it'll be better for all of us.

That's your response to everything: drink?" "No, that's my response to nothing.

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.

Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that

I hope that death contains less than this.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.

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.

the way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart

I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.

Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.

I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

The wisest thing to do if you’re living in hell is to make yourself comfortable.

A woman has to have something on or there's nothing to take off.

Sex can sometimes become the most horrible of tasks.

Never bring a lot of money to where a poor man lives. He can only lose what little he has. On the other hand it is mathematically possible that he might win whatever you bring with you. What you must do, with money and the poor, is never let them get too close to one another.

Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly – all else is desperation.

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

Love breaks my bones and I laugh

Only the boring get bored

Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?

Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.

This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.

love iz a big fat turkey and every day iz thanksgiving

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.

And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.

Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.

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.

There is light somewhere.

If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.

It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn't put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching. We had both been robbed.

great books are the ones we need

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.

Careful poetry and careful people live only long enough to die safely.

God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.

It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

sometimes I hate you," she said.

I got lost somehow, began staring up her legs. I was always a leg man. It was the first thing I saw when I was born. But then I was trying to get out. Ever since I have been working in the other direction and with pretty lousy luck.

I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.

There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

I had no feeling for the things so many others needed.

I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.

Without literature, life is hell.

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.