Charles Bukowski Quotes
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If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
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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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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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'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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I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
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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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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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Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
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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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You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
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Sex was a trap, a snare. It was for animals.
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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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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 are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
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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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We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
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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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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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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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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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The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.