An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says
a difficult thing in a simple way.
– 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
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead!
– Charles Bukowski
If I’m an ass, I should say so. If I don’t, somebody else will. If I say it first, that disarms
them.
– Charles Bukowski
I don’t hate people. I just feel better when they aren’t around.
– Charles Bukowski
Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.
– Charles Bukowski
I found out that Hollywood is more crooked, dumber, crueler, stupider than all the books I’ve
read about it. They didn’t go deeply enough into how it lacks art, and soul, and heart – how
it’s really a piece of crap. There are too many hands directing, there’re too many fingers in
the pot, and they’re all kind of ignorant about what they’re doing. They’re greedy, and
they’re vicious. So you don’t get much of a movie.
– Charles Bukowski
The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life
away 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.
– Charles Bukowski
You have to die a few times before you can really live.
– 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
Of course it’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
– Charles Bukowski
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.
– Charles Bukowski
When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.
– Charles Bukowski
Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.
– Charles Bukowski
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
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
Sex is interesting, but it’s not totally important. I mean it’s not even as important 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
What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.
– Charles Bukowski
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
– 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
Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge at all. Because if you’re
guessing and it doesn’t work out you can just say, “Shit, the gods are against me.” But if you
know and don’t do, you’ve got attics and dark halls in your mind to walk up and down in and
wonder about. This ain’t healthy, leads to unpleasant evenings, too much to drink and the
shredding machine.
– Charles Bukowski
Stay with the beer. Beer is continuous blood. A continuous lover.
– 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
If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.
– Charles Bukowski
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
– Charles Bukowski
The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. But
what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.
– Charles Bukowski
Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
– Charles Bukowski
The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers
from the Watchtower itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you’re out, you’re dead. This pitch
is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It’s no wonder they keep
getting busted.
– Charles Bukowski
There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.
– Charles Bukowski
My ambition is handicapped by laziness.
– Charles Bukowski
Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
– Charles Bukowski
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
Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
Some lose both and become accepted.
– Charles Bukowski
People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the
ability to feel or love.
– Charles Bukowski
Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.
– Charles Bukowski
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
Find what you love and let it kill you.
– Charles Bukowski
Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.
– 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
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
Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure
is concerned.
– Charles Bukowski
A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.
– 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
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
The difference between art and life is that art is more bearable.
– Charles Bukowski
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.
– Charles Bukowski
The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.
– 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
Sex can sometimes become the most horrible of tasks.
– Charles Bukowski
Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
– Charles Bukowski
A woman has to have something on or there’s nothing to take off.
– Charles Bukowski
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or
politics.
– Charles Bukowski
The ladies usually go for the biggest damn fool they can find; that is why the human race
stands where it does today: We have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside,
like the chocolate Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children.
– Charles Bukowski
People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the
ability to feel or love.
– Charles Bukowski
If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.
– Charles Bukowski
Courts are places where the ending is written first and all that precedes is simply vaudeville.
– Charles Bukowski
I have been treated better than I should have been – not by life in general nor by the
machinery of things but by women.
– Charles Bukowski
Life’s as kind as you let it be.
– Charles Bukowski