Quotes from Charles Bukowski

I hid in bars, because I didn't want to hide in factories.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

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.

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

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

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

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 it's cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it's 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

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.

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

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

Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.

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

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.

Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.

Baby, I said, I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.

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

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.

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

Life's as kind as you let it be.

my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.

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

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.

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.

The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.