Charles Bukowski Quotes
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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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Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
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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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I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
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If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
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'I squeezed Fay’s hand, kissed her on the forehead. She closed her eyes and seemed to sleep then. She was not a young woman. Maybe she hadn’t saved the world but she had made a major improvement. Ring one up for Fay.'
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'Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.'
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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.
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The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
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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.
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What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
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You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
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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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There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
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My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
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We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
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Sex was a trap, a snare. It was for animals.
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Hell was what you made it.
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I didn't even have a uniform, just a cap. I wore my regular clothes. The way my shackjob Betty and I drank there was hardly money for clothes.
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Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
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We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.
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We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
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To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
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If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many 'bads' - bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even 'bad' white males. Only, when you write about 'bad' white males, they don't complain about it. And need I say that there are 'good' blacks, 'good' homosexuals and 'good' women?