Quotes from Charles Bukowski

then I saw a church. I didn't particularly like churches, especially when they were filled with people. but I didn't fugure it to be that way at 9 p.m. I walked up the steps. hey hey, woman, come see what's left of your man. I could sit there a while and breath in the stink, maybe make something out of God, maybe give him a chance. I pulled at the door. the motherfucker was locked.

estoy seguro de que he hecho cantidad de cosas por tí que ni siquiera recuerdas, aún así, nunca te caí especialmente bien.

La miré. Todo el cielo y toda la tierra corrían por aquellos ojos.

then I saw a church. I didn't particularly like churches, especially when they were filled with people. but I didn't figure it out to be that way at 9 p.m. I walked up the steps. hey hey, woman, come see what's left of your man. I could sit there a while and breath in the stink, maybe make something out of God, maybe give him a chance. I pulled at the door. the motherfucker was locked.

Lo más agradable de él era que nunca hablaba, a menos que se le preguntara algo. Nunca le pregunté nada.

but now it's the waiting on death. it's not death that's the problem, it's the waiting.

I have consumed more drink than the first one hundred men you will pass on the street or meet in the madhouse. I scratch my belly and dream of the albatross. I have joined the great drunks of the centuries: Li Po, Toulouse-Lautrec, Crane, Faulkner. I have been selected but by whom?

that's what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.

Not only did the grown-ups get mean, the kids got mean, and even the animals got mean. It was like they took their cue from the people.

The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy. It was something we would all have to work for once again.

Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.

What a weary time those years were—to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

poetry it takes a lot of desperation dissatisfaction and disillusion to write a few good poems. it's not for everybody either to write it or even to read it.

if they can exist on just these fragments of things, then I can exist too.

Listen, is it true that Celine and Hemingway died on the same day?

So there I was: neither an intellectual, an artist; nor did I have the saving roots of the common man. I hung like something labeled in between, and I guess, yes, that is the beginning of insanity.

Education was the new god, and educated men the new plantation masters.

she's grinning, her eyes bright with the remainder of the world.

our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides.

The lines on the page were pulled tight, like a man screaming, but not "Joe, where are you?" More like Joe, where is anything?

it took me a long time to find the most interesting person to drink with: myself

And I mean you and nobody but you.

I'm sick and I'm tired and I don't know where to go or what to do. well, at lunchtime we all ride down the elevator together making jokes and laughing and eating the recooked food; first they buy it then they fry it then they reheat it then the sell it, can't be a germ left in there or a vitamin either.

and when love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself.