Charles Bukowski

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

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.

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.

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

Never get out of bed before noon.

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

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

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.

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.

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.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

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

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

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

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

There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

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

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.

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

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

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

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

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.

If youre losing your soul and you know it then youve still got a soul left to lose.

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

Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.

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

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

Existence was not only absurd it was plain hard work.

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

The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable.

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.

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

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.

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.

Joan of Arc had style. Jesus had style.

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.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

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

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

Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase; then your mind might be free.

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?

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.

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.

Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.

The hangover was brutal but he didnt mind. It told him he had been somewhere else some place good.

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.

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.

It's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical sense and are not easy to fool with laughter

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

Fiction is an improvement on life.

There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock

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.

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.

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

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

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.

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Our disappointment sits between us.

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

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

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.

Writers are nothing but beggars with a good line.