Charles Bukowski Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions... Billions of dollars are appropriated at the twinkling of an eye. Nothing little counts.
-
Success depends almost entirely on how effectively you learn to manage the game's two ultimate adversaries: the course and yourself.
-
I want to see what I look like when I'm old - I'm curious where that's going to take me.
-
A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.
-
If your mom is still around, you're so lucky.
-
Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you're trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.
-
I hate ugliness. You know I'm allergic to ugliness.
-
I'm developing artists for my new record label, my son's band, Intangible, being one of them.
-
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn't I would still speak to them.
-
Usually, historical revelations come from days of legwork, ploughing through piles of letters and papers in archives or even private homes, looking for the telling phrase or letter that someone else has missed.
-
Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.
-
As an actor, I want to build a career as an actor. It's hard to even get a job sometimes, so as my career builds, I can be more picky than I used to be.
-
It was hard to write or compose... we just had to go back and finish making songs. If we make 20 songs, we'll throw away 10.
-
Truth is a tendency.
-
Home, to me, is where I am and where I feel most comfortable. Obviously, Malaysia is home. In L.A., my home is my apartment because that's my Malaysia.
-
I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.
-
If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.
-
The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.
-
After the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Romanians were crazed with happiness. People who never met each other before hugged each other in the streets - convinced that tomorrow things would look different. Then came the many disappointments.
-
Man, I'm a conspiracy theorist by nature. You can't experience the federal penal system and not be somewhat skeptical.
-
It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.
-
I was realizing, 'I work out all the time. Why can't I drop this weight?' It's really food. So I started dieting a little.
-
The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor.
-
Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.