Quotes from Charles Bukowski

Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.

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

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

Your parents don't give you much love, do they?' 'I don't need that stuff,' I told her. 'Henry, everybody needs love.' 'I don't need anything.' 'You poor boy.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: 'Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?' They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

But my whole life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.

I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me.

You don't go on "probably" when love and guns are in hand.

There's nothing unusual about love.

Fay had a spot of blood on the left side of her mouth and I took a wet cloth and wiped it off. Women were meant to suffer; no wonder they asked for constant declarations of love.

Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.

and love was lightning and remembrance

I suppose like others I have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple sound of water running in tubs and wished to drown

in this room the hours of love still make shadows.

I'll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.

my 6 foot goddess makes me laugh the laughter of the mutilated who still need love... she has saved me from everything that is not here

Love dries up, I thought as I walked back to the bathroom, even faster than sperm.

Love is for real men.

The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It's truly ridiculous.

I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don't want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them