Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.

I want to be with you. It's as simple, and as complicated as that.

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

No Help of that There is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space. And even during the best moments and the greatest times we will know it We will know it more that ever. There is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that place.

as she drove me through the hills everything screamed inside of me, and I kept saying as we drove along (to myself, of course) fucker, it will pass, everything passes, it's all a joke a joke on you

and love is a word used too much and much too soon.

That's when I first learned that it wasn't enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.

When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.

It seemed better to delay thinking.

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it's your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.

there must be a way. surely there must be a way that we have not yet thought of. who put this brain inside of me? it cries it demands it says that there is a chance. it will not say no.

sometimes I hate you, she said.

Forgive me, I guess I am off in the head, but I mean, except for a quickie piece of ass it wouldn't matter to me if all the people in the world died. Yes, I know it's not nice. But I'd be as contended as a snail; it was, after all, the people who had made me unhappy.

To create art means to be crazy alone forever.

girls please give your bodies and your lives to the young men who deserve them besides there is no way I would welcome the intolerable dull senseless hell you would bring me and I wish you luck in bed and out but not in mine thank you.

Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.

At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

So, that's what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That's what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.

She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.

I have a face like a washrag. I sing love songs and carry steel. I would rather die than cry. I can't stand hounds can't live without them. I hang my head against the white refrigerator and want to scream like the last weeping of life forever but I am bigger than the mountains.

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.