Quotes from Charles Bukowski

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

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

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.

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.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.

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

bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it

I have been treated better than I should have been---not by life in general nor by the machinery of things but by women.

A woman has to have something on or there's nothing to take off.

She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.

There's too much coldness in the world, " I told her. "If people would only talk things out together it would help.

Education was the new god, and educated men the new plantation masters.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.

I am not a man who looks for solutions in God or politics. If somebody else wants to do the dirty work and create a better world for us and he can do it, I will accept it.

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

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

Never get out of bed before noon.

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead."

I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic age

My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.

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

Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.

I take much pleasure in being alone but there is also a strange warm grace in not being alone.