469 Inspiring Quotes by Charles Bukowski

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.

As we live we all get caught and torn by various traps. Nobody escapes them. Some even live with them. The idea is to realize that a trap is a trap. If you are in one and you don't realize it, then you're finished.

If you're doing it for money or fame, don't do it. If you're doing it because you want women in your bed, don't do it.

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."

Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can't sit still, move, or even go decently insane.

To create art means
to be crazy alone
forever.

Anything, anything to stop drowning in this dull, trivial and cowardly existence.

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

You shoulda known the entirety of the trap, a**hole,
love means eventual pain
victory means eventual defeat
grace means eventual slovenliness,
there's no way
out...you see, you
understand?

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start.

Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. Some lose both and become accepted.

The gods seldom
give
but so quickly
take.

She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.

Knowledge is knowing as little as possible.

I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
graveyard.

Ya got cigarettes?" she asks. "Yes," I say,
"I got cigarettes." "Matches?" she asks.
"Enough to burn Rome." "Whiskey?"
"Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River
of pain." "You drunk?" "Not yet.

That's the way it ends. The thin edge of the wedge.

My 6 foot goddess makes me laugh the laughter of the mutilated who still need love... she has saved me from everything that is not here.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.

Animals never worry about heaven or hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure ad moving on. Yet most people are stricken wth fear. They fear failure so much that they fail.

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do -- mostly with my time.

There are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.

I
think that the
world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just
cats and
rain, rain and cats, very nice, good
night.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

What good are you? What can you do? It has cost me a thousands of dollars to raise you, feed you, clothe you!
Suppose I left you here on the street? Then what would you do?" "Catch butterflies.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

And if I have any advice to give to anybody it's this: take up watercolor painting.

Places to hunt places to hide are getting harder to find, and pet canaries and goldfish too, did you notice that?

Eating seemed very important.

What you see on the freeway is just what there is,
a funeral procession of the dead,
the greatest horror of our time in motion.
I'll see you there tomorrow!

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.

How come you walk so funny?"
"I was frying some chicken in the pan and the grease exploded, it burned my legs."
"I thought maybe you had war wounds."
"No, the chicken did it.

There is a blue bird in my heart that wants to get out.

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.

A good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable.

I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it's not pretty.

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

Human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.

What? You'd dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?" That's when you need a drink the most.

Complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.

I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.

Yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut.

But isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

They thought I had guts they were wrong I was only frightened of more important things.

If I have any advice to anybody it's this: take up watercolor painting.

I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.

Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

I just sit here and look at my hands. It is one of my better evenings. Yesterday I was very depressed.

My garden
in the sun and in the rain
and in the day and in the night
pain is a flower
pain is flowers
blooming all the time.

She knew what she wanted and it wasn't me. I know more women like that than any other kind.

Having nothing to struggle
against
they have nothing to struggle
for.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.

I'm too careless. I don't put out enough effort. I'm tired.

There's nothing unusual about love.

The best part was
pulling down the
shades
stuffing the doorbell
with rags
putting the phone
in the
refrigerator
and going to bed
for 3 or 4
days.
and the next best
part
was
nobody ever
missed
me.

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.

People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.

Walking out with the people, I didn't know which was more exciting, the air race, the parachute jump that failed, or the cunt.

My greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II.

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.

Life's as kind as you let it be.

You women have more holes than swiss cheese.

And the color in my eyes
has gone back into the sea.

What were you going to do tonight?" "I was going to listen to the songs of Rachmaninoff." "Who's that?" "A dead Russian.

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.

All people start to
come apart finally
and there it is:
just empty ashtrays in a room
or wisps of hair on a comb
in the dissolving moonlight.

The wisest thing to do if you're living in hell is to make yourself comfortable.

People need me. I fill them. If they can't see me for a while they get desperate, they get sick. But if I see them too often I get sick. It's hard to feed without getting fed.

I can see where creation often stops while the body still lives and often does not care to. the death of life before life dies.

Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it.

Understand me. I'm not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

Crawled like a blind slug into the
web.

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.

Love is not a candle burning down. Life is. And love and life are not the same or else Love, having choice, nobody would ever die.

It does seem
the more we drink
the better the words
go.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.

We must bring
our own light
to the
darkness.

That your power of command
with simple language was
one of the magnificent things of
our century.

I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with.

Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.

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.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.

It doesn't matter if Prince Charles falls off his horse
or that the hummingbird is so seldom
seen
or that we are too senseless to go
insane.
coffee. give us more of that NOTHING
coffee.

Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.

Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist.

Don't ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out.

She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.

This incompleteness is all we have.

Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay. You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it's for something else.

A bad trip? this whole country, this whole world is on a bad trip, friend. but they'll arrest you for swallowing a tablet.

I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.

Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.

I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.

Life wore a man out, wore a man thin.
Tomorrow would be a better day.

The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.

The whole world is caught in her glance and at last the universe is magnificent.

So tired you want to quit, then you get more tired, and forget to quit.

My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.

First of all read Céline; the greatest writer of 2,000 years.

I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his passion. He must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street.

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.

Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.

And love was lightning and remembrance.

You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn't deceive anybody. It's the deceivers who make you feel bad.

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.

There is enough treachery , hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day.

Never get out of bed before noon.

Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.

Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.

We are the sickest of the breed -- as fine museums -- great art --
generations of knowledge -- are all forgotten
as we find profundity in being an
asshole.

It's good to have things done with when they don't work it's also good not to hate or even forget the person you've failed with.

It seemed to me that I had never met another person on earth as discouraging to my happiness as my father. and it appeared that I had the same effect upon him.

I've been so
down in the mouth
lately
that sometimes when I
bend over to
lace my shoes
there are
three
tongues.

People are not good to each other. Perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

I remember when each 4th lot was vacant and overgrown, and the landlord only go this rent when you had it, and each day was clear and good and each moment was full of promise.

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.

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.

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.

You know, doctor, wisdom comes at a hell of an hour--when youth is gone, the storm is over and the girls have gone home.

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside -- remembering all the times you've felt that way.

What a weary time those years were, to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

One can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid.

I no longer want it all, just some comfort and some sex and some minor love.

Wherever the crowd goes run in the other direction. They're always wrong.

and we are in bed together
laughing
and we don't care
about anything.

I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

As the soul wanes, form appears.

Hate contains truth. beauty is a facade.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.

Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow
did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be
young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh.
I hated you when it would have taken less courage
to love.

Now we are citizens of nothing. the sun itself knows the sad truth of how we surrendered our lives and deaths to simple ritual….how we said no, no, no, no to the most beautiful YES ever uttered -
life itself.

The psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on.

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.

No concept of danger,
reality, flow or
compassion.
you can feel the despair
escaping from their
machines,
their lives as hopeless and
as numbed as yours.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

If it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.

She wasn't very
interesting
but few people
are.

Jan was an excellent fuck...she had a tight pussy and she took it like it was a knife that was killing her.

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it's your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

The empty, the angry, the lonely, the tricked, we are all museums of fear.

She slammed the door and
was gone.
I looked at the closed door
and at the doorknob
and strangely
I didn't feel
alone.

Death meant little to me. It was the last joke in a series of bad jokes.

It's hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it's -- don't. I'm going to send out for some fried chicken.

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

She's mad but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.

For a man of 55 who didn't get laid until he was 23 and not very often until he was 50 I think that I should stay listed via Pacific Telephone until I get as much as the average man has had.

I didn't know who to
believe
but
one thing I do
know: when a man is
living
many claim relationships
that are hardly
so
and after he dies, well,
then it's everybody's
party.

When you're young
a pair of
female
high-heeled shoes
just sitting
alone
in the closet
can fire your
bones;
when you're old
it's just
a pair of shoes
without
anybody
in them
and
just as
well.

Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.

I have no time for things that have no soul.

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.

Be it peace or happiness
let it enfold you.

I do think that poetry is important though, if you don't strive at it, if you don't fill it full of stars and falseness.

Since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

To be young is the only religion.

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.

It got so bad that Al thought
maybe it was
him
so he went to a shrink
and asked
and the shrink said,
"you're one of the sanest men
I've ever met."
poor Al.
that made him feel
worse
than ever.

I know that some night
in some bedroom
soon
my fingers will
rift
through
soft clean
hair
songs such as no radio
plays
all sadness, grinning
into flow.

I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occurring.

If you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.

You've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her, and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.

The way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with new truths that run down from the top of the head
and out of the heart.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, just look at the cats, you'll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is.

When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.

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.

I hope that I never become a vogue. A vogue is damned and doomed forever.

I'll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.

The price of creation
is never
too high.
the price of living
with other people
always
is.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.

I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.

'I think I need a drink.'
'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.'

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

I write fiction"
"What's fiction?"
"Fiction is an improvement on life.

I went home each night dizzy and sick. He was murdering me with the sound of his voice.

The less I needed, the better I felt.

Beware women grown
old
who were never
anything but
young.

I have been treated better than I should have been -- -not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus!

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

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

I am this fiery snail crawling home.

What a pitiful mass of dangerous nothing.

She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.

I want quiet thunder.

Agony sometimes changes
form
but
it never ceases for
anybody.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

He still couldn't write or
what he wrote didn't
work
because that tremendous
brave optimism
that buoyed everybody up
so well
during the depression
just turned to
sugar water
during
good times.

Without literature, life is hell.

Regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

My poems are only bits of scratching
on the floor of a
cage.

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 had also read somewhere that if a man didn't truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job.

I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.

I have one problem, I don't hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.

People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.

And then there are some who believe that old relationships can be revived and made new again. but please if you feel that way don't phone don't write don't arrive.

I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even stupidly happy almost without cause and left alone I am mostly content.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

"What is your advice to young writers?"
"Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes."

Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it.

My youth, one time, that time I knew even through the nothingness, it was a celebration of something not to do but only know.

Why does a man destroy himself or what destroys him? I would have to judge that suicide is mostly the tool of the thinking man. The right to suicide should be the same as the right to love.

Are you anti-black?
I'm anti-everything.

We had such tremendous fun and much agony together for some years.

Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.

I view his furry storage tanks -- what can a man think about while looking at a cat's nuts? Certainly not the sunken navies of great sea battles.

You can't beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. And the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. Your life is your life. Know it while you have it.

You've got to rise from the floor alone or fall back alone.

Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

I got up and walked back to my roominghouse. The moonlight was bright. My footsteps echoed in the empty street and it sounded as if somebody was following me, I looked around. I was mistaken. I was quite alone.

I was fighting a small fight of my own which wasn't leading
anywhere-but like a man with a bent spoon trying to dig through a cement wall I knew that a small fight was better than quitting: it
kept the heart alive.

Bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it.

Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.

I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible -- - not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance: trying to connect.

There was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.

Whiskey makes the heart beat faster but it sure doesn't help the mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just from the deadly drone of existence?

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

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.

Love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons.

True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.

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

You fall into the mirror,
come through the other
side staring at a lightbulb.

Something else is hurting you -- that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think.

I've learned to feel good when
I feel good.
it's better to be driven around in a red porsche
than to own
one. the luck of the fool is
inviolate.

No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.

Love is a horse with a broken leg trying to stand while 45,000 people watch.

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.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

The rent is a little higher here
but so far I've been able to
pay it
and that's a miracle too
like still maybe being sane
while thinking of guns and sidewalks
and old ladies in libraries.

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human -- they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.

It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

For me
obedience to another is the decay
of self.

We only asked for leopards to guard our thinning dreams.

You get so alone at times that it just makes sense.

I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

I was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

God is a lonely place without steak.

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

I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.

I wait on my fix:
I am a poetry junkie.

The streets were full of insane and dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.

The trouble with a mask is it never changes.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.

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

You can't overestimate the stupidity of the general public.

Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.

If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.

In a more universal sense, we only get one thing. You know...a head stone if we're lucky; if not, green grass.

Nothing can save you except writing. It keeps the walls from failing.

I am aware that a computer can't create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

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.

The hangover was brutal but he didn't mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, someplace good.

If you let them kill you, they will.

my happiest times were
when
i was left alone in
the house on a
saturday.

So, that's what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That's what they needed. People were fools.

The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can´t save it.

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.

Waiting
in a life full of little stories
for a death to come.

It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.

Do you hate people?"
"I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."

But as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

When I get down to my last dime I'll just walk over to skid row.
There are some real weirdos down there.
They're everywhere.

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they all made the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.

Look, let me put it this way: with me, you're number one and there isn't even a number two.

In this room the hours of love still make shadows.

The first place smelled like work, so I took the second.

All that shit they were fed about democracy and opportunity was just to keep them from burning down the palace.

Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.

So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all.

I just want a hot cup of coffee,black,and I don't want to hear about your troubles.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?

Bullfighting can be an art Boxing can be an art Loving can be an art Opening a can of sardines can be an art.

I felt that even the sun belonged to my father, that I had no right to it because it was shining upon my father's house. I was like his roses, something that belonged to him and not to me.

The telephone is needed for
Emergency purposes only
These people are not
Emergencies, they are
Calamities.

I run with the hunted.

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

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.

I've never been lonely. I like myself. I'm the best form of entertainment I have.

One doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine.

I don't know. It's been terribly hard for me. How do I know you won't do it again?'
'Nobody is ever quite sure of what they will do. You aren't sure what you might do.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

My spoon was bent so that if I wanted to eat I had to pick the spoon up with my right hand. If I picked it up with my left hand, the spoon bent away from my mouth. I wanted to pick the spoon up with my left hand.

I was beaten down long ago in some alley in another world.

You can steal my women but don't play with my whiskey.

"Are you sick now?"
"No."
"Then what's wrong?"
"I don't like people."
"Do you think that's right?"
"Probably not."

If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

It's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?

A life can change in a tenth of a second or sometimes it can take 70 years.

She likes that and I like it too because to make a thing true all you've got to do is believe.

They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.

I enjoy the bad things that are said about me. It enhances sales and makes me feel evil. I don't like to feel good 'cause I am good. But evil? Yes. It gives me another dimension.

I was alone with myself. And disgusting as I was it was better than being with somebody else, anybody else, all of them out there doing their pitiful little tricks and handsprings.

Our disappointment sits between us.

Was I the only person who was distracted by this future without a chance?

I am a series of small victories and large defeats.

I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age.

Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.

When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.

If I never see you again
I will always carry you
inside
outside
on my fingertips
and at brain edges
and in centers
centers
of what I am of
what remains.

People so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic
with divine creatures
who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us.

Something had happened. The bath towels knew it, the bathtub and the toilet knew it. My father turned and walked out the door. He knew it. It was my last beating. From him.

I have lost my rhythm.
I can't sleep.
I can't eat.
I have been robbed of
my filth.

I decided to stay in bed until noon. Maybe by then half the world would be dead and it would only be half as hard to take.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.

Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it.

The Artist," an ancient sage had once said, "is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.

We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nightsour silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti.

I am not a man who looks for solutions in God or politics. If somebody else wants to do the dirty work and create a better world for us and he can do it, I will accept it.

There are too many ways to drown even if you don't want to drown.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

There's no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.

I have, he went on, betrayed myself with
belief, deluded myself with love
tricked myself with sex.
the bottle is damned faithful, he said,
the bottle will not lie.

Stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.

I'm very clever
at
hiding poems
perhaps more
clever than I
am
at
writing
them.

Much publishing is done through politics, friends, and natural stupidity.

Of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse.

Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.

It's all overrated, man. Sex is only a great thing if you're not getting any.

Magic persists without us no matter what we may do to try to spoil it.

People see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.

My cock was hard, but my spirit wasn't in it.

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.

Take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning.

Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateurs drunks, the bores.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

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

Fiction is an improvement on life.

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.

Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way.

I'm not a guru. I wish you wouldn't pose these things at me, man. Ask me about women or something.

I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.

Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.

Some moments are nice, some are
nicer, some are even worth
writing
about.

You're the most unknown famous man I ever met.

It's 4:30 in the morning, it's always 4:30 in the morning.

Love is for real men.

The grace is being able to like rock music, symphony music, jazz … anything that contains the original energy of joy.

There's a light somewhere. It may not be much light but it beats the darkness.

People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can't break out of the movie. And it's a bad one.

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

You boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgot to get old.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

So be careful when you bend over.

And love is a word used
too much and
much
too soon.

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

The courage it took to get out of bed each
morning
to face the same things
over and over
was
enormous.

In New York you've got to have all the luck.

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

I suppose like others I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tubs and wished to drown.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.