Charles Bukowski Quotes

I would give anything for a female's hand on me tonight. they soften a man and then leave him listening to the rain.

You were destroyed by what you befriended.

That's what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.

How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

Banion wondered which was worse - being sodomized by aliens, or having to sit through two hours of Charles Ives.

i dunno," i said, "but i have an idea that people who don't think too much tend to look younger longer

The human body is mostly blood and mystery and sadness.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?

You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive? I don't know. I'm already tired.

I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.

The writing's easy, it's the living that is sometimes difficult.

Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer.

Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth - alongside of me.

Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

If I stop writing I am dead. And that's the only way I'll stop: dead.

A man who can beat the horses can do anything he makes up his mind to do.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals.

it is good to be sitting some place in public at 2:30 in the afternoon without getting the flesh ripped from your bones.

...in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.

People don't do me much good.

Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.

The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.

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.

You don't go on "probably" when love and guns are in hand.

I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave ma a relaxex manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.

Angels, we have grown apart.

I thought you were sane," I said, "but you're just as crazy as the rest of them.

Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.

I do not like to work and have no trade but i do like to eat, so this is basic, the basic training of slaves to fear.

like the fox I run with the hunted and if I’m not the happiest man on earth I’m surely the luckiest man alive.

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.

It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.

Sweet Christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.

be it peace or happiness let it enfold you

Fiction is an improvement on life

the whole world is caught in her glance and at last the universe is magnificent.

There's nothing unusual about love.

In a more universal sense, we only get one thing. You know...a head stone if we're lucky; if not, green grass.

Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn't know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.

I knew it would be you

You've got to rise from the floor alone or fall back alone.

Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.

If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.

I'm very clever at hiding poems perhaps more clever than I am at writing them.

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

and the color in my eyes has gone back into the sea.

There is no hurry. Time means nothing to you.

Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.