Charles Bukowski Quotes
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Hell was what you made it.
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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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Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
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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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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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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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The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
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The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.
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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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Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
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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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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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If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
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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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Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
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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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'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.'
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Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
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Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
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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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You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
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I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
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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?
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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.