Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

You can't beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it.

The Difference Between Art and Life is that Art is More Bearable

I wasn't lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.

With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.

In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.

The old gal was only another lonely creature in a world that didn't care

Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.

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

Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.

to fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself, so that your life and your death will not be like theirs.

Before my death I hope to obtain my life.

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.

t was almost disappointing because it seemed when stress and madness were eliminated from my daily life there wasn't much left you could depend on.

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well.

And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.

When I write, when I'm going hot, I don't want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you're pushing it.