Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Your writing, she said to me, it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

You don't go on probably when love and guns are in hand.

You bitch, I whispered, I love you. Then I came.

when I was a boy I used to dream of becoming the village idiot. I used to lie in bed and imagine myself the happy idiot able to get food easily ...and easy sympathy, a planned confusion of not too much love or effort. some would claim that I have succeeded.

It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.

New affairs were exciting but they were also hard work. The first kiss, the first fuck had some drama. People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.

but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

A woman is a full time job. You have to choose your profession.

It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.

the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

you are yesterday's bouquet so sadly raided

I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a coffee cup in a park for old men playing chess or silly games of some sort.

Ya got cigarettes?" she asks. "Yes," I say, "I got cigarettes." "Matches?" she asks. "Enough to burn Rome." "Whiskey?" "Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River of pain." "You drunk?" "Not yet.

They have no idea that it can be done by a bus driver, a field hand, or a fry cook. They have no idea where it comes from. It comes from pain, damnation and impossibility. The blow to the soul of the gut. It comes from getting burned and seared and slugged. It comes from...new and awful places and the same old places.

I knew that I was dying. Something in me said, Go ahead, die, sleep, become as them, accept. Then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest bit. It needn't be much, just a spark. A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.

That's the way it ends. The thin edge of the wedge.

Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.

I'm not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay, who isn't?

Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.

The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy.

Money is like sex,' I said. 'It seems much more important when you don't have any...' 'You talk like a writer,' said Francois.

My body gnaws at me from one side and my spirit gnaws at me from the other.

He had long nostril hairs, powerfully intimidating, like an unscheduled nightmare.

There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were.