Inspiring Quotes by Charles Bukowski
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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 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.

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

To be young is the only religion.

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

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

Escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she'll embrace you then when she's satisfied she'll kill you still in her embrace and suck the blood from you.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I had decided against religion a couple of years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren't true, the fools were all the more foolish. What I need is a good doctor, I thought. You either lived or died.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

This incompleteness is all we have.

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

Knowledge is knowing as little as possible.

We only asked for leopards to guard our thinning dreams.

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.

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

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.

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

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

LSD, yeah, the big parade -- everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

The ladies usually go for the biggest damn fool they can find; that is why the human race stands where it does today: we have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside, like the chocolate Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children.

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

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

Love is for real men.

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.

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

It's not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there's no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.

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

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?

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

I am a series of small victories and large defeats.

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.

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

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

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

When I was a boy I used to dream of becoming the village idiot. I used to lie in bed and imagine myself the happy idiot able to get food easily ...and easy sympathy, a planned confusion of not too much love or effort. some would claim that I have succeeded.

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

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

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

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.

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