Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Well, as the boys said, you had to work somewhere. So they accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.

sometimes when everything seems at its worst when all conspires and gnaws and the hours, days, weeks years seem wasted— stretched there upon my bed in the dark looking upward at the ceiling I get what many will consider an obnoxious thought: it's still nice to be Bukowski.

Don't undress my love you might find a mannequin; don't undress the mannequin you might find my love.

Prazan džep ima neku primjesu romantizma samo kada si jako mlad.

you have to accept this reality as the madhouse walls bulge break and the terrified insane flood our ugly streets. you have to accept terrible reality.

It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed, time after time after time, to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

this will never leave me: that I had love and love died; a photo and a piece of tape is not much, I have learned late, but give me 14 days or 14 years, I will kill any man who would touch or take whatever's left.

Often the best parts of life were when you weren't doing anything at all, just mulling it over, chewing on it. I mean, say you figure that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it a sense. You know what I mean? An optimistic pessimism.

who put this brain inside of me? it cries it demands it says that there is a chance. it will not say no.

I walked about naked and barefoot stepping onto shards of glass sometimes feeling it sometimes not.

Baby, that's grammar school. Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working. Out here we call it hustling. I'd like to be a good hustler.

another hot summer night as I sit here and play at being a writer again. and the worst thing of course is that the words will never truly break through for any of us. some nights I have taken the sheet out of the typer and held it over the cigarette lighter, flicked it and waited for the result.

age is no crime but the shame of a deliberately wasted life among so many deliberately wasted lives is.

Don't you wish you were Charles Bukowski? I can paint too. Lift weights. And my little girl think that I am God. Then other times, it's not so good.

it's half-past nowhere everywhere.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else.

I lost almost all the blood in my body in 1957

greater men than I have failed to agree with Life.

all the poets wanted to get disability insurance it was better than immortality.

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead: men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideals.

I didn't know if I was unhappy. I felt too miserable to be unhappy.

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?" "What do you think of Reagan and unemployment?" "I don't think of Reagan or unemployment.

my greatest problem was stamps, envelopes, paper and wine, with the world on the edge of World War II.

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.