Charles Bukowski Quotes
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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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I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
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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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Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
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I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
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We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
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Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.
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A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.
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Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
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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.
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Money is like sex. It seems much more important when you don't have any...
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there's a bluebird in my heart thatwants to get outbut I'm too tough for him,I say, stay in there, I'm not goingto let anybody see you....I only let him outat night sometimeswhen everybody's asleep....he's singing a littlein there, I haven't quite let himdie...and it's nice enough tomake a manweep, but I don'tweep,doyou?
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Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
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When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.
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When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
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Sex was a trap, a snare. It was for animals.
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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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It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
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You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
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Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
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Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
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When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.