Quotes from Charles Bukowski

as the shadows assume shapes I fight the slow retreat now my once-promise dwindling dwindling now lighting new cigarettes pouring more drinks it has been a beautiful fight still is.

don't be ashamed of anything; I guess God meant it all like locks on doors.

Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire…. Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.

if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.

Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing.

YOU HAVE WOUNDED MY HEART FOREVER!

I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his passion. He must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street.

all theories like cliches shot to hell, all these small faces looking up beautiful and believing; I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but believe is a graveyard. we have narrowed it down to the butcherknife and the mockingbird wish us luck.

People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.

My cock was hard, but my spirit wasn't in it.

I can't blame her. but wonder why she's here with me? where are the other guys? how can you be lucky? having someone the others have abandoned?

It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.

You have to die a few times before you actually live.

well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you

There's a small balcony here, the door is open and I can see the lights of the cars on the Harbor Freeway south, they never stop, that roll of lights, on and on. All those people. What are they doing? What are they thinking? We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't.

I no longer want it all, just some comfort and some sex and only a minor love.

I decided to stay in bed until noon. Maybe by then half the world would be dead and it would only be half as hard to take.

since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light

I got up and walked back to my roominghouse. The moonlight was bright. My footsteps echoed in the empty street and it sounded as if somebody was following me, I looked around. I was mistaken. I was quite alone.

in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sound against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love.

Are there good governments and bad governments? No, there are only bad governments and worse governments.

Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive in its own terms.

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.