Quotes from Charles Bukowski

I felt better when everything was in disorder. It will take me some months to get back to normal: I can't even find a roach to commune with. I have lost my rhythm. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I have been robbed of my filth.

I have sat in the dark here electric (haha) typer off lights out radio off drinking in the dark lighting cigarettes in the dark there was fire off the match we are all burning together burning brothers and sisters I like it I like it I like it.

Sunday, the worst god-damned day of them all.

And underneath all that, the fish, the poor fish fighting each other, eating each other. We're like those fish, only we're up here. One bad move and you're finished.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but i'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad.

People need me. I fill them. If they can't see me for a while they get desperate, they get sick. But if I see them too often I get sick. It's hard to feed without getting fed.

And now I wonder which animal of us will eat the other first physically and last spiritually?

There was so much sadness in everything, even when things worked. Then

we know so little, we know so much, we don't know enough.

I was 50 years old and hadn't been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman- even on non-sexual terms-was beyond my imagination.

art as the spirit wanes the form appears.

the worst men have the best jobs the best men have the worst jobs or are unemployed or locked in madhouses.

an intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.

You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn't deceive anybody. It's the deceivers who make you feel bad.

Çarenivîsa mirov ev e; Ku di seranserî temenê xwe da rencê bikiÅŸîne Da ku bikare bijî, Bijî Û bijî Heta ku bikare bimire!

I am bitter sometimes but the taste has often been sweet.

What I wanted was a cave in Colorado with three-years' worth of foodstuffs and drink. I'd wipe my ass with sand. Anything, anything to stop drowning in this dull, trivial and cowardly existence.

They had been afraid of the man with the beautifil eyes. And we were afraid then that all troughout our lives things like that would happen, that nobody wanted anybody to be strong and beautiful like that, that others will never allow it, and that many people will have to die.

We are here to drink beer. We are here to end war. We are here to laugh at the odds, and live life so well that Death will tremble to take us.

I began to feel like a kept man and it felt great.

There's something wrong with me besides melancholia.

when you take it away do it slowly and easily make it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of in my life, amen.

sometimes it does not take a man or a woman, only something alive

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.