Charles Bukowski Quotes
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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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We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
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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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Hell was what you made it.
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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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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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Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.
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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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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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Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
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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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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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'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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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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Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.
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Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
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I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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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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My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.
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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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'People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.'
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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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Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
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Sometimes I felt that I didn’t even know who I was. All right, I’m Nicky Belane. But check this. Somebody could yell out, ‘Hey, Harry! Harry Martel!’ and I’d most likely answer, ‘Yeah, what is it?’ I mean, I could be anybody, what does it matter?