Quotes from Charles Bukowski

MR. JONSTONE IS A FINE MAN! Don't be silly. He's an obvious sadist, I said.

In a sense, as much as I disliked it, education helped when you were looking at a menu or for a job, especially when you were looking at a menu.

I could make it. I could win drinking contests, I could gamble. Maybe I could pull a few holdups. I didn't ask much, just to be left alone.

The kids sit about sipping at their coffees and waiting for it to happen. It isn't going to happen.

They kept chirping and flipping and fingering their mental assholes.

America had been taught that beauty only resided in youth, especially in the female.

Then I heard a man scream from the next ward, Joe, where are you? Joe, you said you'd come back! Joe, where are you? The voice was loud and so sad, so agonized.(...) Joe wasn't coming. It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.

Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn't mad was angry. And the part that wasn't mad or angry was just stupid.

We are dying birds we are sinking ships— the world rocks down against us and we throw out our arms and we throw out our legs like the death kiss of the centipede: but they kindly snap our backs and call our poison "politics.

naturally, we are all caught in downmoods, it's a matter of chemical imbalance and an existence which, at times, seems to forbid any real chance at happiness.

beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone

The earth. Smog, murder, the poisoned air, the poisoned water, the poisoned food, the hatred, the hopelessness, everything. The only beautiful thing about the earth is the animals and now they are being killed off, soon they will be gone except for pet rats and race horses. It's so sad, no wonder you drink so much.

we were never children like your children. We do not understand love songs like your inamorata.

So where do you go? Back to the bottle And back to a tiny room somewhere. And wait. And wait, and wait. That's all.

Ho bisogno soltanto di una buona notte di sonno. Ma tanto per incominciare, non c'è mai un cazzo di niente da leggere. Quando uno ha avuto una certa dose di buona letteratura, non ce n'è più, punto e basta. Bisogna scriversela da soli.

and I said, I was beaten down long ago in some alley in another world.

we were never meant to be what we are or where we are, we are looking for an escape, some music from the sun, the girl we never found. we are betting on the miracle again there before the purple mountains as the horses parade past so much more beautiful than our lives.

nothing in the air but clouds. nothing in the air but rain. each man's life too short to find meaning and all the books almost a waste. I sit and listen to them singing I sit and listen to them.

The old gal was only another lonely creature in a world that didn't care

I bought two tall six-packs of Schlitz and went back to my place and drank down the requiem.

If I bet on Humanity I'd never cash a ticket.

But I gave the girl my address and phone number, thinking we might make it on the springs. (Harriet, you never arrived.)

But it's all the little people, Buk, the twenty-five-buck-a-week guys who gave up everything to keep the thing going. The guys with cardboard in their shoes. The guys who slept on the floor.

At lunchtime (10:24 p.m.) I went out and bought the L.A. Times.