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In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
Charles Bukowski -
We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
Charles Bukowski
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Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
Charles Bukowski -
Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.
Charles Bukowski -
Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
Charles Bukowski -
When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
Charles Bukowski -
You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
Charles Bukowski -
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.
Charles Bukowski
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It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
Charles Bukowski -
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Charles Bukowski -
A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.
Charles Bukowski -
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Charles Bukowski -
'Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.'
Charles Bukowski -
Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
Charles Bukowski
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I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.
Charles Bukowski -
Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
Charles Bukowski
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Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
Charles Bukowski -
Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
Charles Bukowski -
When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.
Charles Bukowski -
My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.
Charles Bukowski