Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Love is not a candle burning down. Life is. And love and life are not the same or else Love, having choice, nobody would ever die.

how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?

the world is better without them. only the plants and the animals are true comrades. I drink to them and with them.

No pain means the end of feeling; each of our joys is a bargain with the devil.

Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.

I see a bright portion under the overhead light that shades into darkness and then into darker darkness and I can't see beyond that.

Never had I known a young girl so beautiful and at the same time so gentle and intelligent. Where were her men? Where had they failed?

Do some living and get yourself a typewriter.

They took all the joy out of fucking by talking about it all the time. I liked to fuck too, but it wasn't my religion.

Beautiful thoughts, and beautiful women never last.

I'm going to open another vottle. not a vottle, but a bottle. you open it and I'll drink it. and you try to write as much as I did without falling off of your chair.

people need me. I fill them. if they can't see me for awhile the get desperate, they get sick. but if I see them too often I get sick. it's hard to feed without getting fed.

The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

The dog approached again, cautiously. I found the bologna sandwich, ripped off a chunk, wiped the cheap watery mustard off, then placed it on the sidewalk. The dog walked up to the bit of sandwich, put his nose to it, sniffed, then turned and walked off. This time he didn't look back. He accelerated down the street. No wonder I had been depressed all my life. I wasn't getting proper nourishment.

all that I know is that I believe in the sound of music and the running of a horse. all else is squabble.

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

agony sometimes changes form but it never ceases for anybody.

We've died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.

I'm only interested in poetry.

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.

about our argument tonight whatever it was about and no matter how unhappy it made us feel remember that there is a cat somewhere adjusting to the space of itself with a delightful wonderment of easiness. in other words magic persists without us no matter what we do against it.

It's not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there's no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.

there was something about that city, though it didn't let me feel guilty that I had no feeling for the things so many others needed. it let me alone. sitting up in my bed the lights out, hearing the outside sounds, lifting my cheap bottle of wine, letting the warmth of the grape enter me as I heard the rats moving about the room, I preferred them to humans. being lost, being crazy maybe is not so bad if you can be that way undisturbed. New Orleans gave me that. nobody ever called my name.

What's wrong with assholes, baby?