Quotes from Charles Bukowski

terror finally becomes almost bearable but never quite terror creeps like a cat crawls like a cat across my mind

Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.

If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice.

there are policemen in the street and angels in the clouds

Here came the waitress. She had on a mini-skirt, high heels, see-through blouse with padded brassiere. Everything was too small for her: her outfit, the world, her mind. Her face was hard as steel. When she smiled it hurt. It hurt her and it hurt me. She kept smiling. That smile was so false the hairs on my arms rose. I looked away.

Was I the only person who was distracted by this future without a chance?

I have, he went on, betrayed myself with belief, deluded myself with love tricked myself with sex. the bottle is damned faithful, he said, the bottle will not lie

All we do is sleep, and eat and lay around and make love. We're like slugs. Slug-love, I call it.

I have lost my rhythm. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I have been robbed of my filth.

the dark is empty; most of our heroes have been wrong

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. Nobody would fuck with me. I could go into a cell for months of meditation where I wouldn't have to look at anybody and they could just send in the wine.

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard

I know what a park bench is and the landlord's knock. There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.

The ass is the face of the soul of sex.

one doesn't even think of the liver and if the liver doesn't think of us, that's fine.

she's half-insane, looking for an out; she's hard, she's scared, she's been fooled, taken, abused, used, over-used . . . but, under all that, to me she's the flower, I see her as she was before she was ruined by the lies: theirs and hers.

I was a bore and didn't know when to smile or fake it. Or rather worse, I did but didn't.

Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.

I´ve given you my time. Its all I´ve got to give - its all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour.

I don't like love as a command, as a search. It must come to you, like a hungry cat at the door.

Every woman is different. Basically they seem to be a combination of the best and the worst—both magic and terrible. I'm glad that they exist, however.

She could talk. If she was a sphinx she could have talked, if she was a stone she could have talked. I wondered when she'd get tired and leave. Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls.

Love dries up, I thought as I walked back to the bathroom, even faster than sperm.

I've got to decide: kill myself or love myself?