Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Don't do it. Don't love me.

a good book can make an almost impossible existence, liveable ( from 'the luck of the word' )

and getting dressed we talk about what else there might be to do, but being together solves most of it, in fact, solves all of it

I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.

My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.

I was in love again. I was in trouble

eleven months. now she's gone gone as they go.

And it seems people should not build houses anymore it seems people should stop working and sit in small rooms on second floors under electric lights without shades; it seems there is a lot to forget and a lot not to do and in drugstores, markets, bars, the people are tired, they do not want to move, and I stand there at night and look through this house and the house does not want to be built

Run with the hunted.

Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking. -- Cecilia to Henry Chinaski, liberty taken changing past tense to present tense (173)

I drank for some time, three or four days. I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. 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.

Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.

this time has finished me.

Sometimes a man doesn't know what to do about things and sometimes it's best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.

one more creature dizzy with love

We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.

What? You'd dare drink right after getting out of jail for intoxication?" That's when you need a drink the most.

we only asked for leopards to guard our thinning dreams.

I'm not the cruel type, but they are, and that's the secret.

Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.

I'm too careless. I don't put out enough effort. I'm tired.