COMMENTS You probably have heard about Charles Bukowski Quotes, if you haven’t well you missed out a lot. Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. Looking for the best Charles Bukowski quotes and sayings? We’ve compiled a list of the top 60 most inspiring Bukowski quotes on life, love, happiness, failure, passion and more.
Charles Bukowski Quotes
- We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.
- Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes – they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.
- I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.
- I didn’t have any friends at school, didn’t want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to 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.
- 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.
- How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
- People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
- When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
- If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
- There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
- Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire…. Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It’s real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you’ve suddenly become an idiot. There’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.
- This is very important – to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything…just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.
- I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
- I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
- My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‘light’ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
- The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.
- Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours.
- Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.
- I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
- If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many ‘bads’ – bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even ‘bad’ white males. Only, when you write about ‘bad’ white males, they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are ‘good’ blacks, ‘good’ homosexuals and ‘good’ women?
- When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‘i’s’ small.
- What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
- I do not like the human race. I don’t like their heads, I don’t like their faces, I don’t like their feet, I don’t like their conversations, I don’t like their hairdos, I don’t like their automobiles.
- 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.
- I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.
- I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says ‘What?’ about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.
- Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren’t sure of was if we had any.
- I used to live on one candy bar a day – it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.
- I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don’t even know I’m working on. It’s a free lunch. A free dinner. I don’t know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.
Bukowski Quotes With Images
Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.
When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.
Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.
Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.
What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.
Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
You have to die a few times before you can really live.
Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.
It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.
I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
It’s better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.
Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
We must.. We must bring our own light to the darkness.
What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.
Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
You’ve to die a few times before you actually live.
I wasn’t much for a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.
If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.
I wasn’t much for a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.
The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
People with no morals often considered themselves freer, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.
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