Charles Bukowski Quotes
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Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
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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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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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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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To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
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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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People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel hate or love.
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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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I was given the job of milking the cows, finally, and it got me up earlier than anybody. But it was kind of nice, pulling at those cows' tits (pg. 172).
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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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Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
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Money is like sex. It seems much more important when you don't have any...
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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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I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
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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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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
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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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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.
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Something was always after a man. It never relented. No rest, ever.
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If I'm an ass, I should say so. If I don't, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms them.
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A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.