Charles Bukowski Quotes
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'They wouldn't fire me. Even the salesmen liked me. They were robbing the boss out the back door but I didn't say anything. That was their little game. It didn't interest me. I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.'
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'Wouldn't you like to come in and have a cup of tea and dry off?''Lady, don't you realize that we don't even have time to pull up our shorts?''Pull up your shorts?''YES, PULL UP OUR SHORTS!' I screamed at her and walked off into the wall of water.
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I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideals.
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Live, shit, drinking and smoking should be the daily bread of all poets.
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To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.
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I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.
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I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
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It began as a mistake.
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Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.
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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.
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Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
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I've never met another man I'd rather be.
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I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.
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Never get out of bed before noon.
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The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.
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If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
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The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
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I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
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Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
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Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.
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There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.
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When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
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I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
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Hell was what you made it.