Charles Bukowski Quotes

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

What? You’d dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?” That’s when you need a drink the most.

Trouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job.

To be young is the only religion.

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

It’s the order of things: each one gets a taste of honey then the knife.

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.

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

If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.

Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.

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

The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.

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.

I was so thin I could slice bread with my shoulderblades, only I seldom had bread.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on.

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.

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

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

there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy

great books are the ones we need

I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.

Why do you insist upon destroying yourself?

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.

too often, the only escape is sleep

one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid

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

Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.

I still have a little whiskey left and therefore a chance.

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

If you let them kill you, they will

You can steal my women but don't play with my whiskey.

I am for the small man who has not forgotten, for the man who loves his beer and his women and his sunlight

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

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

What good are you? What can you do? It has cost me a thousands of dollars to raise you, feed you, clothe you! Suppose I left you here on the street? Then what would you do?" "Catch butterflies

she’s mad, but she’s magic.

love iz a big fat turkey and every day iz thanksgiving

There is light somewhere.

We are hardly ever as strong as that which we create.

For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.

it's better to be happy...if you can..!!

News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.

Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.

Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with.

In New York you've got to have all the luck.

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

Don’t do it. Don’t love me.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

dogs and angels are not very far apart

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