Quotes from Charles Bukowski

I am not like other people. I am burning in hell. the hell of myself.

as the spirit wanes the form appears

what you were will not happen again. the tigers have found me and I do not care.

the best part was pulling down the shades stuffing the doorbell with rags putting the phone in the refrigerator and going to bed for 3 or 4 days. and the next best part was nobody ever missed me.

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.

Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.

I paid, got up, walked to the door, opened it. I heard the man say, that guy's nuts. out on the street I walked north feeling curiously honored.

There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.

the gods seldom give but so quickly take.

She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.

I am a series of small victories and large defeats.

I could understand the moon leaning across a bar on skid row and asking for a drink, but I couldn't understand anything about myself, I was murdered, I was shit, I was a tentful of dogs, I was poppies mowed down by machine-gun fire I was a hotshot wasp in a web I was less and less and still reaching for something, and I thought of her corny remark a night or so ago: You have wounded eyes.

Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It's just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she'll embrace you then when she's satisfied she'll kill you still in her embrace and suck the blood from you.

there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone.

like the fox I run with the hunted and if I'm not the happiest man on earth I'm surely the luckiest man alive.

Well, the rain had stopped but the pain was still there.

It was the first time i had been alone for five days. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.

To ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you: something else is hurting you—that's why you need pot, or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think. Or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. Or Vietnam or Israel or the fear of spiders.

it does seem the more we drink the better the words go.

It was like a church in there as only the truly lost sit in bars on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 a.m.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.