Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Baby, I said, I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me. She looked down at me. Get up off the floor you damn fool and get me a drink.

I didn't like anybody in that school. I think they knew that. I think that's why they disliked me. I didn't like the way they walked or looked or talked, but I didn't like my mother or father either. I still had the feeling of being surrounded by white empty space. There was always a slight nausea in my stomach.

there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, you shouldn't have done that. and the soldier said, FUCK THAT GUY! which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left.

When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.

There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.

all people start to come apart finally and there it is: just empty ashtrays in a room or wisps of hair on a comb in the dissolving moonlight.

The cat is the beautiful devil.

I met Betty on the street. I saw you with that bitch a while back. She's not your kind of woman. None of them are.

When I get out, I thought, I am going to wait a while and then I am going to come back to this place, I am going to look at it from the outside and know exactly what's going on in there, and I'm going to stare at those walls and I'm going to make up my mind never to get on the inside of them again.

The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the flowers were trying harder.

when you're young a pair of female high-heeled shoes just sitting alone in the closet can fire your bones; when you're old it's just a pair of shoes without anybody in them and just as well.

He fell off the table like a crab looking for the sea.

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

our sins are manufactured in heaven to create our own hell.

there is always that space there just before they get to us that space that fine relaxer the breather while say flopping on a bed thinking of nothing or say pouring a glass of water from the spigot while entranced by nothing that gentle pure space it's worth centuries of existence say just to scratch your neck while looking out the window at a bare branch that space there before they get to us ensures that when they do they won't get it all ever. --It's Ours

First paycheck I get, I thought, I'm going to get myself a room near the downtown L.A. Public Library.

few writers like other writers' works. The only time they like them is when they are dead or if they have been for a long time. Writers only like to sniff their own turds. I am one of those. I don't even like to talk to writers, look at them or worse, listen to them. And the worst is to drink with them, they slobber all over themselves, really look piteous, look like they are searching for the wing of the mother. I'd rather think about death than about other writers. Far more pleasant.

we are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecue we are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted we are an unwanted burning as we sizzle and fry to the bone the coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneath us and above the sky is an open hand and the words of wise men are useless it's not a nice world, a nice world it's not ...

As we live we all get caught and torn by various traps. Nobody escapes them. Some even live with them. The idea is to realize that a trap is a trap. If you are in one and you don't realize it, then you're finished.

And you'll cry out my name you'll finally know what you should have known So very long ago.

What a pitiful mass of dangerous nothing

Everything is so sweetly awful, so continuously sweetly awful: the art of consummation: life eating life.

my hands dead my heart dead silence adagio of rocks the world ablaze that's the best for me.