Charles Bukowski Quotes

292 Sourced Quotes

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

Charles Bukowski
I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken — but there's always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed during the night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.

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
It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn't put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching. We had both been robbed.

Charles Bukowski
There is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.

Charles Bukowski
I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.

Charles Bukowski
Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.

Charles Bukowski
It was the poor part of town—small houses and courts with mailboxes full of spiders, mailboxes hanging by one nail, old women inside rolling cigarettes and chewing tobacco and humming to their canaries and watching you, an idiot lost in the rain.

Charles Bukowski
There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.

Charles Bukowski
That was all a man needed: hope. It was a lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

Charles Bukowski
As the shadows assume shapes I fight the slow retreat now my once-promise dwindling dwindling now lighting new cigarettes pouring more drinks it has been a beautiful fight still is.

Charles Bukowski
How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

Charles Bukowski
Nobody can save you but yourself and you're worth saving. it's a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

Charles Bukowski
From the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.

Charles Bukowski
I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.

Charles Bukowski
It was like a church in there as only the truly lost sit in bars on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 a.m.

Charles Bukowski
I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.

Charles Bukowski
I am too sick to lay down the sidewalks frighten me the whole damned city frightens me, what I will become what I have become frightens me.

Charles Bukowski
I didn't feel that way about it. I had been playing with death for some time. I can't say we were the best of friends but we were well acquainted.

Charles Bukowski
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.

Charles Bukowski
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.

Charles Bukowski
People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.

Charles Bukowski
"Wouldn't you like to come in and have a cup of tea and dry off?"
"Lady, don't you realize that we don't even have time to pull up our shorts?"
"Pull up your shorts?"
"YES, PULL UP OUR SHORTS!" I screamed at her and walked off into the wall of water.

Charles Bukowski
So, that's what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That's what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.

Charles Bukowski
I wasn't lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

Charles Bukowski