Charles Bukowski Quotes
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Hell was what you made it.
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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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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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'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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The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
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Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
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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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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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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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You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
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Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
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Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: 'Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?' They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.
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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.
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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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I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
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If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
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The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
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Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
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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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Sex was a trap, a snare. It was for animals.
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The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.
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Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
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Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
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'I'm no preacher but I can tell you this-the lives that people lead are driving them crazy and their insanity comes out in the way they drive.'