bukowski

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
Charles Bukowski
%
Do you hate people?

I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around.
Charles Bukowski, Barfly
%
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 stone-written. 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.
Charles Bukowski
%
what matters most is how well you walk through the fire
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
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. It's
being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for
something, that I might feel loneliness. I'll quote Ibsen, "The
strongest men are the most alone." I've never thought, "Well, some
beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my
balls, and I'll feel good." No, that won't help. 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. I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in
factories. 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. Let's drink more wine!
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
My ambition is handicapped by laziness
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even
start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe
even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It
could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean
derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All
the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want
to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And
it will be better than anything else you can imagine. 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.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
You have to die a few times before you can really
live.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
I don't hate people. I just feel better when they aren't around.
Charles Bukowski
%
there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late
Charles Bukowski
%
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a
hard thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski
%
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a
soul left to lose.
Charles Bukowski
%
Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.
Charles Bukowski
%
I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to,
keeps little photographs of.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted.
Charles Bukowski
%
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of
doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Charles Bukowski
%
Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring
damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
%
I wanted the whole world or nothing.
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
%
being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.
Charles Bukowski
%
A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.
Charles Bukowski
%
Find what you love and let it kill you.
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
%
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
Charles Bukowski
%
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,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
Charles Bukowski
%
Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.
Charles Bukowski
%
Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
Charles Bukowski
%
It was true that I didnt have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that its cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much its cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

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

Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you.  Let it drain you of
your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual
nothingness.  Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.  For all
things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but its much better to
be killed by a lover.

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

Charles Bukowski, Women
%
Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever
there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism,
group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting,
travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing,
sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating,
gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back,
Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet
travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell
apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess
it was nice to have a choice.

Charles Bukowski, Women
%
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.

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

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman
saves you she makes ready to destroy

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.

Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
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. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

Charles Bukowski
%
Baby," I said, "I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.
Charles Bukowski
%
my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.

Charles Bukowski
%
Life's as kind as you let it be.

Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music
%
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
Charles Bukowski
%
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is
grandiose romanticism or politics.

Charles Bukowski, Women
%
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.

Charles Bukowski
%
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.

Charles Bukowski
%
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.

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

Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
%
she was consumed by 3 simple things:
drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more:
youth and beauty

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
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.

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

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

Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
...in that drunken place
you would
like to hand your heart to her
and say
touch it
but then
give it back.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
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. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still
realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter. Most
people make too much of it. On these grounds a good fuck is not to be
entirely scorned. But that's the result of a chance meeting
too. You're damned right. Drink up. We'll have another.

Charles Bukowski
%
Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
I was sentimental about many things: a womans shoes under the bed; one
hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'Im going to
pee.' hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in
the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of
drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide;
eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of
nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together;
comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore;
mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes
divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a
newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because shes
now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park
picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your
drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your
fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together

Charles Bukowski, Women
%
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Charles Bukowski
%
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. At the age of 25 most people were
finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles,
eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible,
like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of
themselves. 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.

Charles Bukowski
%
Without literature, life is hell.

Charles Bukowski
%
Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's
like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing
river of piss.

Charles Bukowski
%
dogs and angels are not
very far apart

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
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.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
I sit here
drunk now.
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
without committing murder
or being
murdered;
without
having ended up in the
madhouse.

as I drink alone
again tonight
my soul despite all the past
agony
thanks all the gods
who were not
there
for me
then.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.
Charles Bukowski
%
I often carry things to read
so that I will not have to look at
the people.
Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
%
Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.
Charles Bukowski
%
I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.
Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
you son of a bitch, she said, I am
trying to build a meaningful
relationship.

you can't build it with a hammer,
he said.

Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
%
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
Charles Bukowski
%
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

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

Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
Garcia Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.
Charles Bukowski
%
It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real
meaning of the sun.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an
alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush
teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially
you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful
for the opportunity to do so?
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
I'm going, she said. I love you but you're
crazy, you're doomed.

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
each man's hell is in a different place:
mine is just up and behind
my ruined face.

Charles Bukowski
%
I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man
without food or water.  Each day without solitude weakened me.  I took
no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it.  The darkness of
the room was like sunlight to me.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
I want so much that is not here and do not know
where to go.

Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
%
Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their
lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.

Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
The trouble with a mask is it never changes

Charles Bukowski
%
you've got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sidewise
for a while
and have your guts
scrambled by a
bully
and the demonic
ladies,
you've got to run
along the edge of
madness
teetering,
you've got to starve
like a winter
alleycat,
you've go to live
with the imbecility
of at least a dozen
cities,
then maybe
maybe
maybe
you might know
where you are
for a tiny
blinking
moment.

Charles Bukowski, Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems
%
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.

Charles Bukowski
%
Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.

It has been a beautiful
fight.

Still
is.

Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
%
it was like any other
relationship, there was
jealousy on both sides,
there were split-ups and
reconciliations.
there were also fragmented moments of
great peace and beauty.

I often tried to get away from her and
she tied to get away from me
but it was difficult:
Cupid, in his strange way, was really
there.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
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.

Charles Bukowski
%
I want to
let her know
though
that all the nights
sleeping
beside her

even the useless
arguments
were things
ever splendid

and the hard
words
I ever feared to
say
can now be
said:

I love
you.

Charles Bukowski
%
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

Charles Bukowski
%
In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

Charles Bukowski, Post Office
%
some moments are nice, some are
nicer, some are even worth
writing
about.

Charles Bukowski, War All the Time
%
if you get married they think you're finished
and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.

Charles Bukowski
%
The fuckers. 
There, I feel better. 
God-damned human race. 
There, I feel better.

Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
she is no longer
the beautiful woman
she was. she sends
photos of herself
sitting upon a rock
by the ocean
alone and damned.
I could have had
her once. I wonder
if she thinks I
could have
saved her?
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
so it's always a process of letting go, one way or another

Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
%
I said goodbye again
sucking up all that was left of her into the
little that was left of
me. I said, 'don't look for me again. fuck it.
we are all lost. goodbye, goodbye.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
in this land some of us fuck more than
we die but most of us die
better than we fuck
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted
your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.
Charles Bukowski
%
We dont even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
Charles Bukowski
%
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?
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
nothing can save
you
except
writing.
it keeps the walls
from
failing.
Charles Bukowski
%
to fight for each minute is to
fight for what is possible within
yourself,
so that your life and your death
will not be like
theirs.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
dont let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.

you cant 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 are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories
%
It wasnt my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.

Charles Bukowski, Pulp
%
Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find
the toilet paper container empty.  Even the most horrible human being
on earth deserves to wipe his ass.

Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do you?

Charles Bukowski
%
writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they
stop being writers.

Charles Bukowski
%
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. 

Charles Bukowski
%
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.

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

Charles Bukowski
%
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.

Charles Bukowski, Women
%
The more crap you believe, the better off you are.

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

Charles Bukowski
%
one can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
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

Charles Bukowski
%
It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if
it wasn't always there.

Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.

The Wine of Forever

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
I wish to weep
but sorrow is
stupid.
I wish to believe
but belief is a
graveyard.

Charles Bukowski
%
Yes Yes

when God created love he didn't help most
when God created dogs He didn't help dogs
when God created plants that was average
when God created hate we had a standard utility
when God created me He created me
when God created the monkey He was asleep
when He created the giraffe He was drunk
when He created narcotics He was high
and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed
He knew what He was doing
He was drunk and He was high
and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes
but when He created you lying in bed
He came all over His Blessed Universe.
Charles Bukowski
%
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
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
and you invented me
and I invented you
and that's why we don't
get along
on this bed
any longer.
you were the world's
greatest invention
until you
flushed me
away.

now it's your turn
to wait for the touch
of the handle.
somebody will do it
to you,
bitch,
and if they don't
you will -
mixed with your own
green or yellow or white
or blue
or lavender
goodbye.

Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping
after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with
fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too
conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with
the family, runs through school and goes into the business
world.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of
society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
%
It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make
your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you
could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
%
my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw
Charles Bukowski
%
To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive
at all. I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be
under there. It might not be the standard thing. Imagine, stripping a
woman down, and she has a body like a little submarine. With
periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would be the one for me. I'd
marry her right off and be faithful to the end.
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
people run from rain but
sit
in bathtubs full of
water.
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
%
and 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.
Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody

not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own

not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
Charles Bukowski
%
For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the
teeter-totter.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
i was born to hustle roses down the avenue of the dead.
Charles Bukowski
%
If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you
follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight
there is.
Charles Bukowski
%
they thought I had guts
they were wrong
I was only frightened of
more important things
Charles Bukowski
%
nobody can save you but yourself and youre worth saving. its a war not
easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.
Charles Bukowski
%
she mad but she
magic. there no lie in her fire.
Charles Bukowski
%
the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them
Charles Bukowski
%
alone with everybody


the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and them men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress...a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all.
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
%
The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.
Charles Bukowski
%
Our disappointment sits between us.
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
%
There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
how come you're so ugly?"

"my life has hardly been pretty  the hospitals, the jails, the jobs, the women, the drinking. some of my critics claim that i have deliberately inflicted myself with pain. i wish that some of my critics had been along with me for the journey. its true that i haven't always chosen easy situations but that's a hell of a long ways from saying that i leaped into the oven and locked the door. hangover, the electric needle, bad booze, bad women, madness in small rooms, starvation in the land of plenty, god knows how i got so ugly, i guess it just comes from being slugged and slugged again and again, and not going down, still trying to think, to feel, still trying to put the butterfly back together again...its written a map on my face that nobody would ever want to hang on their wall.

sometimes ill see myself somewhere...suddenly...say in a large mirror in a supermarket...eyes like little mean bugs...face scarred, twisted, yes, i look insane, demented, what a mess...spilled vomit of skin...yet, when i see the handsome men i think, my god my god, im glad im not them
Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993
%
I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I
like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy,
dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense
of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become
killers.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
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?
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
purple does something strange to me
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most
people simply dont give a damn.
Charles Bukowski
%
unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it
Charles Bukowski
%
love be damned now
as love was damned when it
first arrived.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
...maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity.
But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all
in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost,
knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't
want to.

Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the
dangerous ones.
Charles Bukowski
%
I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to
know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge
quantities.  I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it
made me uncomfortable.  They probably weren't thinking any such thing,
but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
Oh, I dont mean youre handsome, not the way people think of
handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - theyre
beautiful. Theyre wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a
forest on fire.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art
Charles Bukowski
%
I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken -- but there's
always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed
during the night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that
I am not allowed any.
Charles Bukowski
%
the history of melancholia
includes all of us.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
Beware
Those Who
Are ALWAYS
READING
BOOKS
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
%
nobody ever finds
the one
Charles Bukowski
%
I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the
window, your records, your books, our morning coffee, our noons, our
nights, our bodies spilled together, sleeping, the tiny flowing
currents, immediate and forever. Your leg, my leg, your arm, my arm,
your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.
Charles Bukowski
%
When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.
Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
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. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went
crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the
other. I didn't care.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
stay with the beer.

beer is continuous blood.

a continuous lover.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing
is so ridiculous
that only the insane, the clowns, the half-wits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets ... are interesting?
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God:
they are sucking wind through bent straws.
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
I feel strangely normal.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
You have my soul and I have your money
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
%
when the phone rings
I too would like to hear words
that might ease
some of this.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
Dying should come easy:
like a freight train you
don't hear when
your back is
turned.
Charles Bukowski, The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
jan was an excellent fuck...she had a tight pussy and she took it like
it was a knife that was killing her.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
It began as a mistake.
Charles Bukowski
%
I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
%
I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with
her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn't want
conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing
matches. I didn't understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go
into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their
emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty
play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide.
I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
Beauty is nothing, beauty wont stay. You dont know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know its for something else.
Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.
Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
%
There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.
Charles Bukowski
%
be it peace or happiness
let it enfold you
Charles Bukowski
%
That was all a man needed: hope.  It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
%
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
Charles Bukowski
%
If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.
Charles Bukowski
%
Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.
Charles Bukowski
%
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
%
pull a string, a puppet moves ...

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand --
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer:  I don't know,
I don't know ...
Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
%
What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
Charles Bukowski
%
Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
I wasnt lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.
Charles Bukowski
%
Belane, are you nuts?"
Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?
Charles Bukowski
%
I hope that death contains
less than this.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
After dinner or lunch or whatever it was -- with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what -- I said, "Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let's give it up. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Let's go to the zoo. Let's look at animals. Let's drive down and look at the ocean. It's only 45 minutes. Let's play games in the arcades. Let's go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let's have friends. Let's laugh. This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us.
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
%
I thought you were sane," I said, "but you're
just as crazy as the rest of them.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
Are you becoming what you've always hated?
Charles Bukowski, Hollywood
%
we had such tremendous fun
and much agony together
for some years
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
It's a f*** you world.  Well, keep it going anyhow, what the hell.
Charles Bukowski
%
Bad taste makes more millionaires than good taste.
Charles Bukowski, Hollywood
%
life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle -
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned
%
To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art. 
Charles Bukowski
%
animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. neither do I. maybe that's why we get along
Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
%
morning night and noon
the traffic moves through
and the murder and treachery
of friends and lovers
and all the people
move through you.

pain is the joy of knowing
the unkindest truth
that arrives without
warning.

life is being alone
death is being alone.

even the fools weep

morning night and noon.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
That's what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.
Charles Bukowski
%
Don't try.
Charles Bukowski
%
The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
%
New Year's Eve always terrifies me.
Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
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.
Charles Bukowski
%
Human relationships were strange.  I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped.  Then there was a short period when you weren't with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you.  I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
Charles Bukowski, Women
%
we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
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.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
%
as she
drove me through the hills everything screamed inside of
me, and I kept saying as we drove along
(to myself, of course)
fucker, it will pass,
everything passes,
it's all a joke
a joke on you
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
%
When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.
Charles Bukowski
%
and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it
Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck
%
dont undress my love
you might find a mannequin
dont undress the mannequin
you might find love.
shes long ago forgotten me.
hes trying on a new hat and looks more the coquette then ever.
she is a child and a mannequin and death.
i can't hate that.
she didnt do anything unusual.
I only wanted her to. 
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
%
When you clean up a city, you destroy it.
Charles Bukowski
%
You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
Charles Bukowski
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I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt
Charles Bukowski, Hollywood
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You are thirty minutes late."
"Yes."
"Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?"
"No."
"Why not, pray tell?"
"Well, if the funeral was mine I'd have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
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And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn't even get a job as a dishwasher.
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
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To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, cant sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
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Never trust a man in a jumpsuit
Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music
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Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.
Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
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Its so easy to be easyif you let it.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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I was only kidding about the hundred," she says.

oh," I say, "what will it cost me?"

she lights her cigarette with
my lighter and looks at me
through the flame:

her eyes tell me.

look," I say, "I don't think I
can ever pay that price again.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.
Charles Bukowski, South of No North
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Forgive me, I guess I am off in the head, but I mean, except for a quickie piece of ass it wouldn't matter to me if all the people in the world died. Yes, I know it's not nice. But I'd be as contended as a snail; it was, after all, the people who had made me unhappy.
Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
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I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
Charles Bukowski, Women
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Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski
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we only asked for leopards to guard
our thinning dreams.
Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last
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News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
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this time has finished me.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didnt happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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What? Youd dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?
Thats when you need a drink the most.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
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Thats when I first learned that it wasnt enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.
Charles Bukowski
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The nights you fight best are
when all the weapons are pointed at you,
when all the voices hurl their insults
while the dream is being strangled.

The nights you fight best are
when reason gets kicked in the gut,
when the chariots of gloom encircle you.

The nights you fight best are
when the laughter of fools fills the air,
when the kiss of death is mistaken for love.

The nights you fight best are
when the game is fixed,
when the crowd screams for your blood.

The nights you fight best are
on a night like this
as you chase a thousand dark rats from your brain,
as you rise up against the impossible,
as you become a brother to the tender sister of joy

and move on

regardless.
Charles Bukowski
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I
have a face like a washrag. I sing
love songs and carry steel.

I would rather die than cry. I can't
stand hounds can't live without them.
I hang my head against the white
refrigerator and want to scream like
the last weeping of life forever but
I am bigger than the mountains.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.
Charles Bukowski
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Hey baby, when I write, I'm the hero of my shit.
Charles Bukowski
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You know the typical crowd, Wow, its Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because theres nothing out there. Its stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. Ive never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. Thats all. Sorry for all the millions, but Ive never been lonely. I like myself. Im the best form of entertainment I have.
Charles Bukowski
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In the old days, before I was married, or knew a lot of women, I would just pull down all the shades and go to bed for three or four days. I'd get up to shit. I'd eat a can of beans, go back to bed, just stay there for three or four days. Then I'd put on my clothes and I'd walk outside, and the sunlight was brilliant, and the sounds were great. I felt powerful, like a recharged battery. But you know the first bring-down? The first human face I saw on the sidewalk, I lost half my charge right there.
Charles Bukowski, Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993
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sometimes I hate you,"
she said.
Charles Bukowski, Love is a Dog from Hell
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I didn't like parties.I didn't know how to dance and people frightened me, especially people at parties. They attempted to be sexy and gay and witty and although they hoped they were good at it, they weren 't. They were bad at it. Their trying so hard only made it worse.
Charles Bukowski, Hollywood
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Food is good for the nerves and the spirit.  Courage comes from the belly  all else is desperation.
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
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and love was lightning and remembrance
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
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Fiction is an improvement on life
Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
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Run with the hunted.
Charles Bukowski
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I think I need a drink.'
'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.
Charles Bukowski, Women
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Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.
Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
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