Quotes from Charles Bukowski

I don't know. It's been terribly hard for me. How do I know you won't do it again?' 'Nobody is ever quite sure of what they will do. You aren't sure what you might do.

Potential, I said, doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.

bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it

This birth thing. And this death thing. Each one had it's turn. We entered alone and we left alone. And most of us lived lonely and frightened and incomplete lives. An incomparable sadness descended up on me. Seeing all that life that must die. Seeing all that life that would first turn to hate, to dementia, to neuroses, to stupidity, to fear, to murder, to nothing - nothing in life and nothing in death.

our bones like stems into the sky will forever cry victory

There still might be a place for us somewhere.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, just look at the cats, you'll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is.

I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.

I found the best thing I could do was just to type away at my own work and let the dying die as they always have.

The greatest men are the most alone.

Cats tell me without effort all that there is to know.

A woman must be nursed into subsistence by love, where a man can become stronger by being hated. - from 'Cows in Art Class

Angels, we have grown apart.

I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.

The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.

I don't know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else say like looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. then you forget it and you're back again.

You get so alone at times that it just makes sense.

I was so thin I could slice bread with my shoulderblades, only I seldom had bread

peace of mind and heart arrives when we accept what is: having been born into this strange life we must accept the wasted gamble of our days and take some satisfaction in the pleasure of leaving it all behind.

when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric" I know what he meant I know what he wanted: to be completely alive every moment in spite of the inevitable. we can't cheat death but we can make it work so hard that when it does take us it will have known a victory just as perfect as ours

Sometimes you have to take the whole concept of Art and throw it out on its whore ass.

I run with the hunted.

Are you anti-black? I'm anti-everything.

Let it die. Let there be a new beginning. It's awful. Goodnight.