230 Quotes by Charles Bukowski

The days run away like wild horses over the hills. (Quote Meaning)

I don't hate people. I just feel better when they're not around. (Meaning)

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. (Quote Meaning)

Isolation is the gift. (Meaning)

I never met another man I'd rather be. (Quote Meaning)

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.

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts. (Meaning)

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

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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.

Find what you love and let it kill you. (Quote Meaning)

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

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.

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.

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

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.

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

You have to die a few times before you can really live. (Meaning)

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I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.

Some people never go crazy. (Quote Meaning)

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.

Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later. (Meaning)

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

Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.

That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. 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.

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.

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

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

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. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

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

We're all going to die, all of us; what a circus! (Quote Meaning)

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.

You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time. (Meaning)

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.

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

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

I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.

Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn't have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink's office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.

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.

nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

The world is full of boring, identical and mindless people.

And don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

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.

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude.

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It's just a little while, and then it burns away... Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste. (Quote Meaning)

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

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.

Success is always dangerous. It can make an asshole out of anybody.

We are here to laugh at the odds. (Meaning)

You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire (Quote Meaning)

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

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.
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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.

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

The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

The less I needed, the better I felt. (Meaning)

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

as the spirit wanes the form appears

Don't fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice.

The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

People empty me. I have to get away to refill. (Quote Meaning)

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

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

Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?

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. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.

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 walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.

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

Let it die. Let there be a new beginning. It’s awful. Goodnight.

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.

Dog is much admired by Man because he believes in the hand which feeds him. A perfect set-up. For 13 cents a day you've got a hired killer who thinks you are god. A dog can't tell a Nazi from a Republican from a Commie from a Democrat and, many times, neither can I.

I was laying in bed one night and I thought 'I'll just quit - to hell with it.' And another little voice inside me said 'Don't quit - save that tiny little ember of spark.' And never give them that spark because as long as you have that spark, you can start the greatest fire again.

It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.

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.

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.

There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.

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

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

Are you becoming what you've always hated?

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

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

I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.

But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.

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.

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

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?

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 had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.

In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it (Quote Meaning)

I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.

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

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

The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.

An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.

I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.

It’s never quite right, all the things we are taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we die, all the lives we live.

My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. (Meaning)

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

the tigers have found me and I do not care.

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.

People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way. (Quote Meaning)

What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.

I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.

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

You have my soul and I have your money

With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.

Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.

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

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

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

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.

The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.

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

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.

I've never met another man I'd rather be.

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

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.

Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.

Life's as kind as you let it be.

I don't know about other people, but when I wake up in the morning and put my shoes on, I think, Jesus Christ, now what?

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

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

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.

I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for 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.

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

When love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself. we ask for no mercy or no miracles; we are strong enough to live and to die and to kill flies, attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can't sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles; and don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.

your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn't help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.

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.

our bones like stems into the sky will forever cry victory

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.

I am a series of small victories and large defeats.

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

Only the boring get bored

To create art means to be crazy alone forever.

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.

It’s so easy to be easy—if you let it.

More often than not Democratic Law works to the advantage of the few even though the many have voted; this, of course, is because the few have told them how to vote.

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

I have no time for things that have no soul.

I lie as truthfully as I can.

Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.

I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.

I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.

Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.

great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

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

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

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.

as a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.

I am a poem. There is no way out.

Dying in a a war never stopped wars from happening.

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.

I like women who haven’t lived with too many men. I don’t expect virginity but I simply prefer women who haven’t been rubbed raw by experience. There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk in their eyes in their laughter and in their gentle hearts. Women who have had too many men seem to choose the next one out of revenge rather than with feeling. When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. You’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.

I don't remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.

There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longer he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send 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.

Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun.

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

There still might be a place for us somewhere.

Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

Boring damned people. (Quote Meaning)

If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.

Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don't forget indigestion. I wasn't different from anyone else: There sat the 18-pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.

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

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

We’ve died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.

I was in love again. I was in trouble

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

Before my death I hope to obtain my life.

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

the tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.

Without literature, life is hell.

Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.

I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.

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

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

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

Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.

Sundays kill more people than bombs.

Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.

Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have love.

If you let them kill you, they will

Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

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

The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.

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

When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. you’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.

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.

I had no feeling for the things so many others needed.

If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.

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

It’s the order of things: each one gets a taste of honey then the knife.

It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, "crazy." But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.

I am for the small man who has not forgotten, for the man who loves his beer and his women and his sunlight

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

I still have a little whiskey left and therefore a chance.

Death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.

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

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

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.

We must bring our own light to the darkness

In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.

Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.

There's music in everything, even defeat.

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

What's genius? I don't know but I do know that the difference between a madman and a professional is that a pro does as well as he can within what he has set out to do and a madman does exceptionally well at what he can't help doing.

I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave ma a relaxes manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.