Quotes from Charles Bukowski

We must bring our own light to the darkness. Nobody is going to do it for us.

Something else is hurting you. That's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips or rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think.

I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

is there any wonder why the world is where it's at now? just notice the creature sitting near you in a movie house or standing ahead of you in a supermarket line. or giving a State of the Union Address. that the gods have let us go on this long this badly.

The tigers have found me, and I do not care.

I don't want to stay where I'm not wanted. I don't want to stay where I'm disliked.

The telephone is needed for Emergency purposes only These people are not Emergencies, they are Calamities.

I talked to Miriam. She says you paint and write, you're an artist at rare times I'm an artist; at most other times I'm nothing

the next time you listen to Borodin remember his wife used his compositions to line the cat boxes with or to cover jars of sour milk;

You boys can keep your virgins, give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they made all the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.

My father didn't drive because he wanted to save gas. He needed the gas to drive to and from his invisible job.

There's too much coldness in the world, I told her. If people would only talk things out together it would help.

No life anywhere, no life in this town or this place or in this weary existence

the gift is having a daughter more gentle than you are, whose laughter is finer than yours.

The difference between being subtle and abstract is the difference between knowing and saying it in a gentler way and not knowing and saying it in a way that will let you off the hook. To be abstract with the word is all right if you use it like paint and seek the pure word, but it is difficult, in the language, to have near purity without near meaning.

And now I wonder which animal of us will eat the other first physically and last spiritually? We consume animals and then one of us consumes the other, my love.

Ich bin ein alter Witz, und schlafe ein.

Then I opened the bread. It was green and moldy and had a sharp sour smell. How could they sell bread like that? What kind of a place was Florida?

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

it's like an old movie-- 35 years old-- that nobody ever saw or understood but me and even though the critics would dub it ordinary i like it very much.

and as the worms pant for your bones, I would so like to tell you that this happens to bears and elephants

we forget the terror of one person aching in one room alone unkissed untouched cut off watering a plant alone without a telephone that would never ring anyway.

I am not like other people other people are like other people. they are all alike: joining grouping huddling they are both gleeful and content and i am burning in hell. my heart is a thousand years old i am not like other people.