Charles Bukowski Quotes
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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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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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We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
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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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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
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Money is like sex. It seems much more important when you don't have any...
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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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Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
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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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Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
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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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'Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.'
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I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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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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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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In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
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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 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.
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Sex was a trap, a snare. It was for animals.
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Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
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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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My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.
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Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.