Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Sweet Christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.

Love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons.

Hay cosas peores que estar solo pero a menudo toma décadas darse cuenta de ello y más a menudo cuando esto ocurre es demasiado tarde y no hay nada peor que un demasiado tarde.

it is all ash and dry leaves and grief gone like an ocean liner.

A cat is only itself.

I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me feel uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.

Style means no shield at all. Style means no front at all. Style means ultimate naturalness. Style means one man alone with billions of men about.

I HAVE DIED TOO MANY TIMES BELIEVING AND WAITING, WAITING IN A ROOM STARING AT A CRACKED CEILING WAITING FOR THE PHONE, A LETTER, A KNOCK, A SOUND… GOING WILD INSIDE WHILE SHE DANCED WITH STRANGERS IN NIGHTCLUBS… OUT OF THE ARMS OF ONE LOVE AND INTO THE ARMS OF ANOTHER

sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.

we drove on and on, past little villages and both good things and bad things were happening to the people in those villages too, but I still was nothing but arms and ears and eyes and maybe there'd be either some good luck for me or more death tomorrow.

I know that some night in some bedroom soon my fingers will rift through soft clean hair songs such as no radio plays all sadness, grinning into flow.

American women drove hard bargains and the ended up looking the worst for it. The few natural American women left were mostly in Texas and Louisiana.

I didn't like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it - I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank. I was a lunatic.

Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it's not pretty.

I do think that poetry is important though, if you don't strive at it, if you don't fill it full of stars and falseness.

The apartment was built at the edge of a high cliff so that when you looked out the back window it seemed as if you were twelve floors up instead of four. It was very much like living on the edge of the world - a last resting place before the final big drop.

people are worn away with striving, they hide in common habits. their concerns are herd concerns. few have the ability to stare at an old shoe for ten minutes or to think of odd things like who invented the doorknob? they become unalive because they are unable to pause undo themselves unkink unsee unlearn roll clear. listen to their untrue laughter, then walk away.

he asked, what makes a man a writer? well, I said, it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers. are you desperate? I don't know...

Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little.

La mayoría de la muerte de la gente es una farsa, no queda en ellos nada que pueda morir

Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?

The Artist, an ancient sage had once said, is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.

We're forced into absurd lives, against which the only sane response is to wage a guerrilla operation of humour and lust and madness.