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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.'
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski
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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.
Charles Bukowski -
To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
Live, shit, drinking and smoking should be the daily bread of all poets.
Charles Bukowski -
It began as a mistake.
Charles Bukowski
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Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
Charles Bukowski -
I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.
Charles Bukowski -
I've never met another man I'd rather be.
Charles Bukowski -
Never get out of bed before noon.
Charles Bukowski
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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.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski
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Hell was what you made it.
Charles Bukowski -
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.
Charles Bukowski -
Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
Charles Bukowski -
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
Charles Bukowski