Charles Bukowski Quotes

293 Sourced Quotes

And I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets... are interesting?

Charles Bukowski
I'm going, she said. I love you but you're crazy, you're doomed.

Charles Bukowski
The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

Charles Bukowski
Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.

Charles Bukowski
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.

Charles Bukowski
Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.

Charles Bukowski
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.

Charles Bukowski
It is all ash and dry leaves and grief gone like an ocean liner.

Charles Bukowski
I didn't like anybody in that school. I think they knew that. I think that's why they disliked me. I didn't like the way they walked or looked or talked, but I didn't like my mother or father either. I still had the feeling of being surrounded by white empty space. There was always a slight nausea in my stomach.

Charles Bukowski
I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can't.

Charles Bukowski
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
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
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
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
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
In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.

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

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

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

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

Charles Bukowski