Quotes from Charles Bukowski

unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it

When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.

I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.

If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.

love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.

Eyes. Those damn eyes fucked me forever.

stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress…a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all.

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

when I am feeling low all i have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns

nobody ever finds the one

I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.

some men never die and some men never live but we're all alive tonight.

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.

when we were kids laying around the lawn on our bellies we often talked about how we'd like to die and we all agreed on the same thing; we'd all like to die fucking (although none of us had done any fucking) and now that we are hardly kids any longer we think more about how not to die and although we're ready most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have fucked our lives away.

That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.

I hope that death contains less than this.

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.

I think I need a drink.' 'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.

I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible--- not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance: trying to connect.

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.

I feel strangely normal.

Love breaks my bones and I laugh