Quotes from Charles Bukowski

it's good to have things done with when they don't work it's also good not to hate or even forget the person you've failed with.

Long ago, among other lies they were taught that silence was bravery.

That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying.

If you're going to try, go all the way. otherwise, don't even start.

I am sick with caring.

Her violence frightened me. She always claimed that I was the jealous one, and I was often jealous, but when I saw things working against me I simply became disgusted and withdrew. Lydia was different. She reacted. She was the Head Cheerleader at the Game of Violence.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.

I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn't have much to argue about.

Once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own tail, it swallowed and swallowed until it got halfway round, and there it stopped and there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own self. Some fix, that. We only have ourselves to go on, and it's enough…

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

That's your response to everything: drink? No, that's my response to nothing.

I kept telling myself that all the women in the world weren´t whores, just mine.

Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have love

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

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.

Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.

I will put on my shoes and shirt and get out of here - it'll be better for all of us.

You can't overestimate the stupidity of the general public.

The ocean, I said, look at it out there, battering, crawling up and down. And underneath all that, the fish, the poor fish fighting each other, eating each other. We're like those fish, only we're up here. One bad move and you're finished. It's nice to be a champion. It's nice to know your moves.

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid one are full of confidence.

There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. Dumb fuckers. Their minds are full of shit. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magic with divine creatures who help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us

Everything was eternally dreary, dismal, damned. Even the weather was insolent and bitchy.

There will always be something to ruin our lives. It all depends on what or which finds us first. You're always ripe and ready to be taken.