Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Sometimes you make a mistake, taking the wrong poem more often I make the mistake, writing it.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate

Shakespeare never did this.

I'd listen to the radio and look at the walls and get drunk enough to almost forget her but then she would return once again.

the worst sin in the world is when the poor try to rob the poor. the enemy is fairly obvious, why weaken our ranks?

There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked—most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don't like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely. I knew that I wasn't entirely sane. I still knew, as I had as a child, that there was something strange about myself. I felt as if I were destined to be a murderer, a bank robber, a saint, a rapist, a monk, a hermit.

Gathered around me were the weak instead of the strong, the ugly instead of the beautiful, the losers instead of the winners. It looked like it was my destiny to travel in their company through life. That didn't bother me so much as the fact that I seemed irresistible to these dull idiot fellows.

I was like a turd that drew flies instead of like a flower that butterflies and bees desired.

What kind of d*ck are you? Celine asked. -The best in L.A. -Yes? What's L.A. stand for? -Lost as*holes.

as the junkies junk as the alkies drink as the whores whore as the killers kill the albatross blinks its eyes the weather stays mostly the same.

it's necessary for me sometimes just to be alone and quiet and doing nothing. - my telephone

She's mad but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.

Everybody had to conform, find a mold to fit into. Doctor, lawyer, soldier -- it didn't matter what it was. Once in the mold you had to push forward. Sussex was as helpless as the next man. Either you managed to do something or you starved in the streets.

it is a fine sunny day and great matters loom across the horizon of history. Carthage in my rearview mirror, I blend into Time.

This kind of life is like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us.

But it's only when a man gets to the point of a gun in his mouth that he can see the whole world inside of his head. Anything else is conjecture, conjecture and bullshit and pamphlets.

Living was easy - all you had to do was let go. And have a little money. Let the other men fight the wars, let the other men go to jail.

Bun?tatea putea fi uneori g?sit? în mijlocul iadului.

I never pump up my vulgarity. I wait for it to arrive on its own terms.

stood a supervisor, another Stone, and he had this look on his face—they must practice it in front of mirrors, all the supervisors had this look on their faces—they looked at you as if you were a hunk of human shit.

it's as if he were hiding in there and I want to console him, say: "I am sorry, poor fellow, but creation has its limits.

the balloon pops and I walk across a kitchen on a rainy day in February to check on eggs and bread and wine and sanity to check on glue to paste nice pictures on these walls.

Why does a man destroy himself or what destroys him? I would have to judge that suicide is mostly the tool of the thinking man. The right to suicide should be the same as the right to love.