Charles Bukowski Quotes

I hope that death contains less than this.

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

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

They were beautiful nothings

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

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.

If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice.

What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.

There was nothing glorious about the life of a drinker or the life of a writer.

If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.

Never get out of bed before noon.

Don't ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, "crazy." But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.

I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.

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

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.

My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.

Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.

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

There is nothing as boring as the truth.

I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.

my greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II.

Love breaks my bones and I laugh

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

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

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.

I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.

I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.

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

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

The Artist," an ancient sage had once said, "is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.

sometimes I hate you," she said.

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

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.

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

Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing

I guess we often get the deep blues, both of us, and wonder what it all means- the people, the buildings, the day by day things, the waste of time, of ourselves.

The pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how--usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep.

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 would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I'd become a monk. I'd pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine.

I wanted the whole world or nothing.

And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.

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

If you want to create, you'll create.

When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row." "There are some real weirdos down there." "They're everywhere.

since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light