Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women, it is because of these who I met were that. There are many 'bads' - bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even 'bad' white males. Only, when you write about 'bad' white males, they don't complain about it. And need I say that there are 'good' blacks, 'good' homosexuals and 'good' women?

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.

Sometimes I've called writing a disease. If so, I'm glad that it caught me.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

I have two rules. One is, never trust a man who smokes a pipe. The other is, never trust a man with shiny shoes.

there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity

Love breaks my bones and I laugh

I'm going, she said. I love you but you're crazy, you're doomed.

Find what you love and let it kill you. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it's much better to be killed by a lover.

Love is a Dog from Hell.

It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the 'light' and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.