Quotes from Charles Bukowski

It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When she came back we didn't sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn't put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching. We had both been robbed.

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

you feel that you've wasted your years and yourself it didn't work for me either but isn't there always one good thing to look back on? think of how many cups of coffee we drank together.

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure ad moving on. Yet most people are stricken wth fear. They fear failure so much that they fail.

SHUT THAT GOD-DAMNED THING OFF!" there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, "you shouldn't have done that." and the soldier said, "FUCK THAT GUY!" which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did.

They're waiting for you to say all these grand statements, you know? You march across the room and you're supposed to say 'DEATH HAS TWELVE WINGS LIKE THE ANGEL OF HELL!' but people aren't built that way. You can only say 'Hey, uh, baby, why don't ya' make me a cup of coffee?

she was consumed by 2 simple things: despair, loneliness; and oh 2 more: youth and beauty

if death is so fearful then life must be good? dandy then, babe, genuinely traginew, and I've found out why men sign their names to their works— not that they created them but more than the others did not.

We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.

That is the nature of Woman. They like the mutual exchange of dirty laundry, a bit of screaming, a bit of dramatics. Then an exchange of vows.

I had a cigar in my mouth and whiskey on my breath. I felt like money. I looked like money.

you you're a beast, she said your big white belly and those hairy feet. you never cut your nails and you have fat hands paws like a cat your bright red nose and the biggest balls I've ever seen. you shoot sperm like a whale shoots water out of the hole in its back. beast beast beast, she kissed me, what do you want for breakfast?

what matter most is how well you walk trough fire.

that's what kills a man: lack of change.

I got his ashes, she said, and I took them out to sea and I scattered his ashes and they didn't even look like ashes and the urn was weighted with green and blue pebbles…

Creation is like anything else good: You have to wait on it; ambition has killed more Artists than indolence.

you smirk, look at her (what's this?), you're cut somewhere, love it, the dripping of red onto your dirty torn undershirt, the whiskey roaring through your invincibility: you're young, you're big, and the world stinks from centuries of Humanity while you're on course and there's something left to drink—

It's hell when you're too good to make money.

SUICIDE. Like a light going on. In the darkness. That there is an out helps you stay in.

Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing.

Eleven years. Although each night had been long, the years had gone fast.

It was a lucky night.

a poem is a city burning

Jim, did your father really blow his brains out because of your mother? Yeah.He was on the telephone.He told her he had a gun.He said, If you don't come back to me I'm going to kill myself. Will you come back to me?´ And my mother said, No. There was a shot and that was that. What did your mother do? She hung up. All right, I'll see you tonight buddy.