Quotes from Charles Bukowski

anything, compared to the people, is a foundation worth searching for. anything.

mainly thinking, well, I'm still alive and have the ability to expel wastes from my body and poems. and as long as that's happening I have the ability to handle betrayal loneliness hangnail clap and the economic reports in the financial section.

But I didn't want to be anything anyhow. And I was certainly succeeding.

If there's anything worse than a whore it's a bore.

and I sit there alone with you and Dostoevsky as the real and the artificial heart continues to falter, famished… I love you but don't know what to do.

What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.

complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.

it's better to be happy...if you can..!!

Listen, friend, he said, this whole game is just one big deck of cards. if you want to get into the game you have to take whatever comes up in the shuffle.

sometimes you've got to kill 4 or 5 thousand men before you somehow get to believe that the sparrow is immortal, money is piss and that you have been wasting your time.

You'll never be a writer if you hide from reality.

I give you soul. I give you wisdom and light and music and a bit of laughter. Also, I am the world's greatest horseplayer.

I walk into the kitchen, look at the typer down there on the floor. It's a dirty floor. It's a dirty typer that types dirty stories

You look down in the mouth. You all right?" "Lost a woman." "You'll have others and lose them too.

you are good but you are too emotional the way to whip life is to quietly frame the agony,study it and put it to sleep in the abstract. is there anything less abstract than dying everyday and on the last day?

The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios … We were all in it together.

First of all read Céline; the greatest writer of 2,000 years

Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?

no concept of danger, reality, flow or compassion. you can feel the despair escaping from their machines, their lives as hopeless and as numbed as yours.

You could sit in there all day drinking coffee and they never asked you to leave no matter how bad you looked. They just asked the bums not to bring their wine and drink it there. Places like that gave you hope when there wasn´t much hope.

if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.

I have met free man in the strangest of places and at ALL ages.

We've each given the hours of our lives in dull rote jobs for other men's profit, and have been asked to be grateful for doing that.

There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk in their eyes in their laughter and in their gentle hearts.