Charles Bukowski Quotes
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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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An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
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Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
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In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
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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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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
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I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
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Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
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It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
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We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
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there were these peopleon the ground,they were reaching up theirarms and trying to pull medownbutthey couldn't doit.I felt like pissing onthem.they were sojealous.all they had to do wasto work their wayslowly up to itas I haddone.such people thinksuccess grows ontrees.you and I,we knowbetter.
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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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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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I thought about taking a shower but I could see the headlines: MAILMAN CAUGHT DRINKING THE BLOOD OF GOD AND TAKING A SHOWER, NAKED, IN A ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. ...I found out later that mail for the church was delivered to the parish house around the corner. But now, of course, I knew where to... shower when I'm down and out.
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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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'I've given you my time. It's all I've got to give - it's all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour.'... 'my time so that you can live in your big house on the hill and have all the things that go with it. If anybody has lost anything on this deal, on this arrangement... I've been the loser.
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Something was always after a man. It never relented. No rest, ever.
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'Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.'
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Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.
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I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
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I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
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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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I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.
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Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death-in a cesspool.