Quotes About Charles Bukowski

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

I went to the kitchen and felt-up the turkey.

It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.

If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.

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

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

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.

People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.

I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.

Your writing, she said to me, it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.

when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity of my city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked the heart away.

LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

Man is the victim of an environment which refuses to understand his soul.

Love is alright for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss!!

they thought that writing had something to do with the politics of the thing. they were simply not crazy enough in the head to sit down to a typer and let the words bang out. they didn't want to write they wanted to succeed at writing.

I once lay in a white hospital for the dying and the dying self, where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die

she was consumed by 2 simple things: despair, loneliness; and oh 2 more: youth and beauty

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

There is nothing quite like the expectancy of the beginning writer, unless it is the conceit of the successful one.

Lady death was ecstatic, that's all, ecstatic. She looked truly beautiful all over.

THEN MY DESK phone rang and I awakened.

Fay had grey hair and always dressed in black. She said she was protesting the war.

Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn't let me.