Charles Bukowski Quotes

293 Sourced Quotes

We do not abandon ship. I say, as corny as it may sound, through the strength and spirit and fire and dare and gamble of a few men in a few ways we can save the carcass of humanity from drowning. No light goes out until it goes out. Let's fight as men, not rats. Period. No further addition.

Charles Bukowski
To die on a kitchen floor at 7 o'clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.

Charles Bukowski
The ladies usually go for the biggest damn fool they can find; that is why the human race stands where it does today: we have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside, like the chocolate Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children.

Charles Bukowski
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
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
I don't understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.

Charles Bukowski
If you can only remain pure in your stupidity, someday you may get a phone call from hell.

Charles Bukowski
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
A woman has to have something on or there's nothing to take off.

Charles Bukowski
If I stop writing I am dead. And that's the only way I'll stop: dead.

Charles Bukowski
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I don't think I'll travel anymore. Travel is nothing but an inconvenience. There is always enough trouble where you are.

Charles Bukowski
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
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
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

Charles Bukowski
As a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.

Charles Bukowski
Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly – all else is desperation.

Charles Bukowski
Alcohol is probably one of the greatest things to arrive upon the earth - alongside of me.

Charles Bukowski
Why don't we go back out there and tell them what happened? because nothing happened except that everybody has been driven insane and stupid by life. in this society there are only two things that count: don't be caught without money and don't get caught high on any kind of high. (Night Streets of Madness)

Charles Bukowski
When I'm drinking around people, I tend to get silly or pugnacious or wild, which can cause problems.

Charles Bukowski
I squeezed Fay's hand, kissed her on the forehead. She closed her eyes and seemed to sleep then. She was not a young woman. Maybe she hadn't saved the world but she had made a major improvement. Ring one up for Fay.

Charles Bukowski
Some men never die and some men never live but we're all alive tonight.

Charles Bukowski
I had decided against religion a couple of years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren't true, the fools were all the more foolish. What I need is a good doctor, I thought. You either lived or died.

Charles Bukowski
I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt

Charles Bukowski