Quotes from Charles Bukowski

It was hard for me to believe. When recess was over I sat in class and thought about it. My mother had a hole and my father had a dong that shot juice. How could they have things like that and walk around as if everything was normal, and talk about things, and then do it and not tell anybody?

It's just that the grape has me down.

is that death stalking me now? no, it's only my cat, this time.

What is your advice to young writers? Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes. What is your advice to older writers? If you're still alive, you don't need any advice. What is the impulse that makes you create a poem? What makes you take a shit?

the nights you fight best are when all the weapons are pointed at you, when all the voices hurl their insults while the dream is being strangled. the nights you fight best are when the game is fixed, when the crowd screams for your blood.

God damn the geraniums! ...It was like trying to screw during an aerial attack.

Careful poetry and careful people live only long enough to die safely.

We use such big words to move nowhere.

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.

All of which is to say, I didn't pay a hell of a lot of attention to grammar, and when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don't know what's happening, nor do I care.

I am old when it is fashionable to be young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

warm light alone tonight in this house, alone with 6 cats who tell me without effort all that there is to know.

your best men are drunks and your worst men are locking them up, your best men are killers and your worst men are selling them bullets

Man is the victim of an environment which refuses to understand his soul.

And then along came Hemingway. What a thrill! He knew how to lay down a line. It was a joy. Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

I didn't know who to believe but one thing I do know: when a man is living many claim relationships that are hardly so and after he dies, well, then it's everybody's party.

It's like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking.

She would have been a better fuck in Greece, maybe. America was a shitty place to fuck.

I still believe in more privacy and less talk.

I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.

waiting in a life full of little stories for a death to come

you've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her,and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.

Are you sick now? No. Then what's wrong? I don't like people. Do you think that's right? Probably not.

it's the same as before or the other time or the time before that. here's a cock and here's a cunt and here's trouble. only each time you think well now I've learned: I'll let her do that and I'll do this, I no longer want it all, just some comfort and some sex and only a minor love. now I'm waiting again and the years run thin. I have my radio and the kitchen walls are yellow. I keep dumping bottles and listening for footsteps. I hope that death contains less than this.