Quotes from Charles Bukowski

She didn't do anything unusual. I only wanted her to.

I am watching a girl dressed in a light green sweater, blue shorts, long black stockings; there is a necklace of some sort but her breasts are small, poor thing, and she watches her nails as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass in erratic circles; a pigeon is there too, circling, half dead with a tick of a brain and I am upstairs in my underwear, 3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting for something literary or symphonic to happen;

She has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world, she has won.

knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge at all.

I had decided against religion a couple of years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren't true, the fools were all the more foolish.

Sometimes we can become too holy and therefore, caged.

What foolishness makes us tweak the nose of Death continually?

For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum.

I write fiction. What's fiction ?? Fiction is an improvement on life.

My only ambition is not to be anything at all; it seems the most sensible thing.

I'd walk down the street and I'd stagger, sober I'd stagger, hear churchbells, wounded dogs, wounded me, all that.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

they tell you to give up cigarettes and booze, and then they tell you that you have 25 more good years ahead of you and then perhaps ten more years to enjoy your old age as you suck on the rewards and memories.

it seemed less real, and that was what was needed.

that they could imagine that I'd want to converse with them at 7 a.m. is an insult to whatever intelligent life is left in our dwindling universe.

They experimented on the poor and if that worked they used the treatment on the rich. And if it didn't work, there would still be more poor people left over to experiment upon.

writing. It is my drug. It is my woman, my wine, my god. My luck.

you realize when you're plucked out of the mainstream that it doesn't need you or anybody else. the birds don't notice you're gone, the flowers don't care, the people out there don't notice, but the IRS, the phone co., the gas and electric co., the DMV, etc., they keep in touch. being very sick and being dead are very much the same in society's eye.

Suicide fails as you get older: There's less and less to kill

the best poems it seems to me are written out of an ultimate need. and once the poem is written, the only need after that is to write another.

I had also read somewhere that if a man didn't truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job, which gave me a considerable advantage over the teachers.

The whole college scene was soft. They never told you what to expect out there in the real world. They just crammed you with theory and never told you hard the pavements were. A college education could destroy an individual for life. Books could make you soft. When you put them down, and really went out there, then you needed to know what they never told you.

I had decided against religion a couple years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren't true, the fools were all the most foolish.

My idea about the whole thing was that most people weren't alcoholics, they only thought that they were. It was something that couldn't be rushed. It took at least twenty years to become a bonafide alcoholic. I was on my 45th year and didn't regret any of it.