Quotes by Charles Bukowski (Page 2 of 3)

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.

Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn't mad was angry. And the part that wasn't mad or angry was just stupid. I had no chance. I had no choice. Just hang on and wait for the end. It was hard work. It was the hardest work imaginable.

The last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

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

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.

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

As the soul wanes, form appears.

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.

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

Nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I don't know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else say like looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. then you forget it and you're back again.

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.

Nothing's news. it's the same old thing in disguise. only one thing comes without a disguise and you only see it once, or maybe never. like getting hit by a freight train. makes us realize that all our moaning about long lost girls in gingham dresses is not so important after all.

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

So be careful when you bend over.

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

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

Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking. -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173).

Soon I'll finish this 5th of Puerto Rican rum. in the morning I'll vomit and shower, drive back in, have a sandwich by 1 p.m., be back in my room by 2, stretched on the bed, waiting for the phone to ring, not answering, my holiday is an evasion, mt reasoning is not.

For me
obedience to another is the decay
of self.

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

The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.

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

Once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own tail, it swallowed and swallowed until it got halfway round, and there it stopped and there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own self. Some fix, that. We only have ourselves to go on, and it's enough.

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

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

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.

Eating seemed very important.

I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.

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

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

That was the trouble with being a writer, that was the main trouble--leisure time, excessive leisure time. You had to wait around for the buildup until you could write and while you were waiting you went crazy, and while you were going crazy you drank and the more you drank the crazier you got.

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?

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

You're afraid of the audience, aren't you?
Yes, but it's not stagefright. It's that I'm there as the geek. They like to watch me eat my shit. But it pays the light bill and takes me to the racetrack. I don't have any excuses about why I do it.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.

God is a lonely place without steak.

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

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.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness.

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

If you let them kill you, they will.

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.

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.

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

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.

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

Without literature, life is hell.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we have not yet
though of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
no.

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.

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

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

There's nothing unusual about love.

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

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

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

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.

In this room the hours of love still make shadows.

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.

I have no time for things that have no soul.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

She wasn't very
interesting
but few people
are.

To create art means
to be crazy alone
forever.

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.

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

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.

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.

When Whitman wrote, I sing the body electric
I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:
to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.
we can't cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us
it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.

I run with the hunted.

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

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

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

There wasn't even resignation on my part, only disgust, a disgust that this had happened to me, and a disgust with the doctors who couldn't do anything about it. They were helpless and I was helpless, the only difference being that I was the victim.

People so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

You women have more holes than swiss cheese.

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

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

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

I knew that I was dying.
Something in me said,
Go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept.
Then something else in me said, no,
save the tiniest bit.
It needn't be much, just a spark.
A spark can set a whole forest on fire.
Just a spark.
Save it.

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.

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.

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.

Crawled like a blind slug into the
web.

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

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.

The gods seldom
give
but so quickly
take.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Regret is mostly caused by not having
done anything.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.

All theories
like cliches
shot to hell,
all these small faces
looking up
beautiful and believing;
I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe but believe is a
graveyard.
we have narrowed it down to
the butcherknife and the
mockingbird
wish us
luck.

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.

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

Don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

We must bring
our own light
to the
darkness.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.