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We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti
Charles Bukowski
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In a more universal sense, we only get one thing. You know...a head stone if we're lucky; if not, green grass.
Charles Bukowski
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Art is its own excuse, and it's either Art or it's something else. It's either a poem or a piece of cheese.
Charles Bukowski
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The pest, in a sense, is a very superior being to us: he knows where to find us and how--usually in the bath or in sexual intercourse or asleep.
Charles Bukowski
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Some men hope for revolution but when you revolt and set up your new government you find your new government is still the same old Papa, he has only put on a cardboard mask.
Charles Bukowski
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In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.
Charles Bukowski
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I don't think I have written a poem when I was completely sober. But I have written a few good ones or a few bad ones under the hammer of a black hangover when I didn't know whether another drink or a blade would be the best thing.
Charles Bukowski
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There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
Charles Bukowski
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The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
Charles Bukowski
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There are no good wars or bad wars. The only thing bad about a war is
to lose it. All wars have been fought for a so-called good Cause on both
sides. But only the victor's Cause becomes history's Noble Cause. It's not a
matter of who is right or who is wrong, it's a matter of who has the best
generals and the better army!
Charles Bukowski
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I don't think I'll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.
Charles Bukowski
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The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.
Charles Bukowski
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Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn't know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar.
Charles Bukowski
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I can't think of any poet-recluses outside of one dead Jeffers. [Robinson Jeffers] The rest of them want to slobber over each other and hug each other. It appears to me that I am the last of the poet-recluses.
Charles Bukowski
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The role of the poet is almost nothing...drearily nothing. And when he steps outside of his boots and tries to get tough as our dear Ezra [Pound] did, he will get his pink little ass slapped.
Charles Bukowski
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A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I'm not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn't much good.
Charles Bukowski
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The human race had always disgusted me. essentially, what made them disgusting was the family-relationship illness, which included marriage, exchange of power and aid, which neighborhood, your district, your city, your county, your state, your nation-everybody grabbing each other's assholes in the Honeycomb of survival out of a fear-animalistic stupidity.
Charles Bukowski
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Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.
Charles Bukowski
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If I stop writing I am dead. And that's the only way I'll stop: dead.
Charles Bukowski
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A woman has to have something on or there's nothing to take off.
Charles Bukowski
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I don't carry notebooks and I don't consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don't like writers, but then I don't like insurance salesmen either.
Charles Bukowski
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If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.
Charles Bukowski
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I don't understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.
Charles Bukowski
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It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.
Charles Bukowski
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The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the "Watchtower" itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you're out, you're dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It's no wonder they keep getting busted.
Charles Bukowski
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Quote of the day
At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
Lafcadio Hearn
Charles Bukowski
Born:
August 16, 1920
Died:
March 9, 1994
(aged 73)
Bio:
Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-born American poet, novelist, and short story writer.
Known for:
The last night of the earth poems (1992)
Ham on Rye (1982)
Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977)
Factotum (1975)
Women (1978)
Most used words:
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man
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life
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day
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