Quotes from Charles Bukowski

People who believe in politics are like people who believe in God: they are sucking wind through bent straws.

God is a lonely place without steak.

we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.

If you want to know where God is, ask a drunk.

God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.

There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I'd become a monk. I'd pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine.

Where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die.

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals.

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

Complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.

If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.

And yet women-good women--frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.

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

Keep your money in your pocket. Or bet it on a good horse.

The human heart, as of course we all know is essentially good

and our few good times will be rare because we have the critical senseand are not easy to fool with laughter

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

We don't even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

I am this fiery snail crawling home.

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.

I hope that death contains less than this.