Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American artist, author, and short-story essayist. His composing was affected by the social, social, and financial feeling of his home city of Los Angeles. His places of business the standard existences of poor Americans, the demonstration of composing, liquor, associations with ladies, and the drudgery of work. Bukowski composed a huge number of ballads, many short stories and six books, in the end distributing more than 60 books. The FBI kept a document on him because of his segment Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground paper Open City.
Here are some of the Best Charles Bukowski Quotes
“Regret is mostly caused by not having done anything.” – Charles Bukowski
“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
“My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.” – Charles Bukowski
“I have one problem, I don’t hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.” – Charles Bukowski
“Having nothing to struggle against they have nothing to struggle for.” – Charles Bukowski
“I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.” – Charles Bukowski
“The worst thing,” he told me, “is bitterness, people end up so bitter.” – Charles Bukowski
“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.” – Charles Bukowski
“Everything you own must be able to fit inside one suitcase; then your mind might be free.” – Charles Bukowski
“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
“I don’t know. It’s been terribly hard for me. How do I know you won’t do it again?’ ‘Nobody is ever quite sure of what they will do. You aren’t sure what you might do.” – Charles Bukowski
“I see a bright portion under the overhead light that shades into darkness and then into darker darkness and I can’t see beyond that.” – Charles Bukowski
“Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking and she was explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren’t sure of was if we had any.” – Charles Bukowski
“Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.” – Charles Bukowski
“I paid, got up, walked to the door, opened it. I heard the man say, “that guy’s nuts.” out on the street I walked north feeling curiously honored.” – 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 spilt 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.” – Chales Bukowski
“Why do we embroider everything we say with special emphasis when all we really need to do is simply say what needs to be said? Of course, the fact is that there is very little that needs to be said.” – Charles Bukowski
“She slammed the door and was gone. I looked at the closed door and at the doorknob and strangely I didn’t feel alone.” – Charles Bukowski
“The gods seldom give but so quickly take.” – Charles Bukowski
“We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.” – Charles Bukowski
“The gods play no favourites.” – Charles Bukowski
“Where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die,” – Charles Bukowski
“He fell off the table like a crab looking for the sea.” – Charles Bukowski
“That your power of command with simple language was one of the magnificent things of our century. (from the poem: result)” – Charles Bukowski
“I believe that to be the world’s greatest living writer there must be something terribly wrong with you. I don’t even want to be the world’s greatest dead writer. just being dead would be fair enough.” – Charles Bukowski
“The ass is the face of the soul of sex.” – Charles Bukowski
“I remember your saying: “make it or break it.” neither happened and it won’t.” – Charles Bukowski
“Crawled like a blind slug into the web” – Charles Bukowski
“You’re the most unknown famous man I ever met” – Charles Bukowski
“Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.” – Charles Bukowski
“It got so bad that Al thought maybe it was him so he went to a shrink and asked and the shrink said, “you’re one of the sanest men I’ve ever met.” poor Al. that made him feel worse than ever.” – Charles Bukowski
“If you don’t have much soul left and you know it, you still got a soul.” – Charles Bukowski
“I knew that I was dying. Something in me said, Go ahead, die, sleep, become like them, accept. Then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest bit. It needn’t be much, just a spark. A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.” – Charles Bukowski
“There wasn’t even resignation on my part, only disgust, a disgust that this had happened to me, and a disgust with the doctors who couldn’t do anything about it. They were helpless and I was helpless, the only difference being that I was the victim.” – Charles Bukowski
“Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing.” – Charles Bukowski
“Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.” – Charles Bukowski
“All we do is sleep, and eat and lay around and make love. We’re like slugs. Slug-love, I call it.” – Charles Bukowski
“People need me. I fill them. if they can’t see me for a while the get desperate, they get sick. but if I see them too often I get sick. it’s hard to feed without getting fed.” – Charles Bukowski
“That’s ONE thing that’s wrong with intellectuals and writers – they don’t feel a hell of a lot except their own comfort or their own pain. which is normal but shitty.” – Charles Bukowski
“I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.” – Charles Bukowski
“I know that some night in some bedroom soon my fingers will rift through soft clean hair songs such as no radio plays all sadness, grinning into a flow.” – Charles Bukowski
“I like dogs better than men and cats better than dogs and myself best of all, drunk in my underwear looking out the window.” – Charles Bukowski
“You know, doctor, wisdom comes at a hell of an hour—when youth is gone, the storm is over and the girls have gone home.” – Charles Bukowski
“The first place smelled like work, so I took the second” – Charles Bukowski
“Being alone you decided, was a magnificent miracle. nothing else made any sense at all. escape” – Charles Bukowski
“First of all read Céline; the greatest writer of 2,000 years” – Charles Bukowski
46th of 92 Best Charles Bukowski Quotes
“All that shit they were fed about democracy and opportunity was just to keep them from burning down the palace.” – Charles Bukowski
“You women have more holes than swiss cheese.” – Charles Bukowski
“And love is a word used too much and much too soon.” – Charles Bukowski
“Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes – they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.” – Charles Bukowski
“She wasn’t very interesting but few people are.” – Charles Bukowski
“There’s no clarity. there was never meant to be clarity.” – Charles Bukowski
“The area dividing the brain and the soul is affected in many ways by experience some lose all mind and become soul: insane. some lose all soul and become mind: intellectual. some lose both and become: accepted.” – Charles Bukowski
“It does seem the more we drink the better the words go.” – Charles Bukowski
“Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do.” – Charles Bukowski
“I feel no grief for being called something which I am not; in fact, it’s enthralling, somehow, like a good back rub” – Charles Bukowski
“It is so dark now with the sadness of people they were tricked, they were taught to expect the ultimate when nothing is promised now young girls weep alone in small rooms old men angrily swing their canes at visions as ladies comb their hair as ants search for survival history surrounds us and our lives slink away in shame.” – Charles Bukowski
“Are you anti-black? I’m anti-everything.” – Charles Bukowski
“My cock was hard, but my spirit wasn’t in it.” – 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
“I run with the hunted.’ – Charles Bukowski
“Love is not a candle burning down. Life is. And love and life are not the same or else Love, having a choice, nobody would ever die.” – Charles Bukowski
“Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way.” – Charles Bukowski
“The world is better without them. only the plants and the animals are true comrades. I drink to them and with them.” – Charles Bukowski
“They took all the joy out of fucking by talking about it all the time. I liked to fuck too, but it wasn’t my religion.” – Charles Bukowski
“Whether I was a genius or not did not so much concern me as the fact that I simply did not want a part of anything. The animal-drive and energy of my fellow man amazed me: that a man could change tires all day long or drive an ice cream truck or run for Congress or cut into a man’s guts in surgery or murder, this was all beyond me. I did not want to begin. I still don’t. Any day I that I could cheat away from this system of living seemed a good victory for me.’ – Charles Bukowski
“One doesn’t even think of the liver and if the liver doesn’t think of us, that’s fine.” – Charles Bukowski
“You’re the most unknown famous man I ever met.” – 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 feel uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.” – Charles Bukowski
“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.” – Charles Bukowski
“Style means no shield at all. Style means no front at all. Style means ultimate naturalness. Style means one man alone with billions of men about.” – Charles Bukowski
“Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.” – Charles Bukowski
“Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.” – Charles Bukowski
“I never met another man I’d rather be. And even if that’s a delusion, it’s a lucky one.” – Charles Bukowski
“That way I wouldn’t have to see the guys in their walking shorts. They looked as if nothing had ever touched them- all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheet of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or even gotten a traffic ticket. Skimmed-milk jollies, the whole bunch.” – Charles Bukowski
“They took all the joy out of fucking by talking about it all the time. I liked to fuck too, but it wasn’t my religion.” – Charles Bukowski
“To create art means to be crazy alone forever.” – Charles Bukowski
“To ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you – that’s why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can’t think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.” – Charles Bukowski
“The price of creation is never too high. the price of living with other people always is.” – Charles Bukowski
“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
“The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can´t save it.” – Charles Bukowski
“Writing was never work for me. It had been the same for as long as I could remember: turn on the radio to a classical music station, light a cigarette or a cigar, open the bottle. The typer did the rest. All I had to do was be there. The whole process allowed me to continue when life itself offered very little, when life itself was a horror show. There was always the typer to soothe me, to talk to me, to entertain me, to save my ass. Basically that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.” – Charles Bukowski
“I found the best thing I could do was just to type away at my own work and let the dying die as they always have.” – Charles Bukowski
“And if I have any advice to give to anybody it’s this: take up watercolour painting.” – Charles Bukowski
“The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us” – Charles Bukowski
“When you’re young a pair of female high-heeled shoes just sitting alone in the closet can fire your bones; when you’re old it’s just a pair of shoes without anybody in them and just as well.” – Charles Bukowski
“How are his poems?” “He’s not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.” – Charles Bukowski
“When I drive the freeways I see the soul of the humanity of my city and it’s ugly, ugly, ugly: the living has choked the heart away.” – Charles Bukowski
“We’ve all heard that little woman who says, “Oh, it’s terrible what these young people do to themselves, in my lsi other drugs, is a terrible thing.” Then you look, the woman who speaks in this way: you have no eyes, no teeth, no brains, no soul, no ass, no mouth, no warmth, no spirit, nothing, just a stick… and even made you wonder how to reduce it in that state teas and pastries and the church.” – Charles Bukowski
“I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.” – Charles Bukowski
“I didn’t know who to believe but one thing I do know: when a man is living many claim relationships that are hardly so and after he dies, well, then it’s everybody’s party.” – Charles Bukowski
“What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.” – Charles Bukowski
