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Charles Bukowski Quotes
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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
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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
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I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.
Charles Bukowski
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Man was born to die. What did it mean? Hanging around and waiting. Waiting for the 'A train.' Waiting for a pair of big breasts on some August night in a Vegas hotel room. Waiting for the mouse to sing. Waiting for the snake to grow wings. Hanging around.
Charles Bukowski
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There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock
Charles Bukowski
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Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.
Charles Bukowski
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I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.
Charles Bukowski
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I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave ma a relaxex manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.
Charles Bukowski
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Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.
Charles Bukowski
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My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
Charles Bukowski
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Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?
Charles Bukowski
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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
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It is good to be sitting some place in public at 2:30 in the afternoon without getting the flesh ripped from your bones.
Charles Bukowski
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"You have a very strange face," she said. "You're not really ugly." "Number four shipping clerk, working his way up." "Have you ever been in love?" "Love is for real people." "You sound real." "I dislike real people." "You dislike them?" "I hate them." We drank some more, not saying much. It continued to snow. Gertrude turned her head and stared into the crowd of people. Then she looked at me. "Isn't he handsome?" "Who?" "That soldier over there. He's sitting alone. He sits so straight. And he's got all his medals on." "Come on, let's get out of here."
Charles Bukowski
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It's hard to drink when you dance. And it's hard to dance when you drink.
Charles Bukowski
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It's 4:30 in the morning, it's always 4:30 in the morning.
Charles Bukowski
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There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets... when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Charles Bukowski
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There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i. e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.
Charles Bukowski
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And it seems people should not build houses anymore it seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floors under electric lights without shades; it seems there is a lot to forget and a lot not to do and in drugstores, markets, bars, the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at night and look through this house and the house does not want to be built
Charles Bukowski
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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
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They laughed. Things were funny. They weren't afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things.
Charles Bukowski
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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.
Charles Bukowski
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From the beginning, through the middle years and up to the end: too bad, too bad, too bad.
Charles Bukowski
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On the radio I heard the news
of that day
at least 6 times, I was
well versed in world
affairs.
the remainder of the stations played a
thin, sick music.
the classical stations refused to come in
clearly
and when they did
it was a stale repetition of standard and
tiresome works.
I turned the radio off.
a strange whirling began in my
head—it circled behind the forehead, clockwise...
I began to wonder, is this what happens
when one goes
mad?
Charles Bukowski
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What a weary time those years were — to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.
Charles Bukowski
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
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:
people
man
love
life
time
god
alone
drink
woman
day
die
feel
felt
live
human
Charles Bukowski on Wikipedia
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