Quotes from Charles Bukowski

I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.

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.

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.

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.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.

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?

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.

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

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.

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.

Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay. You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it's for something else.

each man's hell is in a different place: mine is just up and behind my ruined face.

I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.

It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun

Understand me. I'm not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

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.

people run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

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.

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.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

if you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.

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.

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

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.