Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. He is best known for his brutally honest and unsentimental writing about the lives of ordinary people, often focusing on themes of alienation, loneliness, and the absurdity of life.
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| Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. ― Charles Bukowski |
These quotes offer a glimpse into Bukowski worldview. He saw the world as a harsh and unforgiving place, but he also believed that it was possible to find beauty and meaning in the midst of the ugliness.
Bukowski quotes are often blunt and to the point, but they also have a certain poetic quality to them. They can be funny, sad, and thought-provoking all at the same time.
If you are looking for inspiration or motivation, or if you just need a good laugh, I recommend reading some of Charles Bukowski quotes. They are sure to leave you feeling a little bit more alive.
Here are some of Charles Bukowski most famous quotes: Charles Bukowski quotes about life, love, society, loneliness, solitude, humans, philosophy, poetry, writing and work. Quotes and sayings on happiness, women, pain, sadness, humor, despair, death, misanthropy, alcohol and drinking by Charles Bukowski.
Charles Bukowski Quotes and Sayings
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
You have to die a few times before you can really live.
Do you hate people? I don't hate them. I just feel better when they're not around.
I do not like the human race. I don't like their heads, I don't like their faces, I don't like their feet, I don't like their conversations, I don't like their hairdos, I don't like their automobiles.
We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside - remembering all the times you've felt that way.
Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
I wanted the whole world or nothing.
My ambition is handicapped by laziness.
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.
Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
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| An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. ― Charles Bukowski |
If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
Find what you love and let it kill you.
I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.
Some lose all mind and become soul, insane. Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. Some lose both and become accepted.
Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours.
I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.
I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.
Never get out of bed before noon.
I felt like crying but nothing came out. It was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can't feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. But I think I have known it pretty often, too often.
Being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.
Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
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.
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| You have to die a few times before you can really live. ― Charles Bukowski |
There is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.
Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that.
There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
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.
A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.
My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.
I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
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.
Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing.
Of course it's possible to love a human being if you don't know them too well.
A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won't let go.
I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.
People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.
I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.
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| My ambition is handicapped by laziness. ― Charles Bukowski |
Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.
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.
'Baby,' I said, 'I'm a genius but nobody knows it but me.'
Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire.... Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It's real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you've suddenly become an idiot. There's no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can't vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.
We don't even ask happiness, just a little less pain.
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.
The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.
You boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.
I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.
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.
What a weary time those years were – to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
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.
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| Do you hate people? I don't hate them. I just feel better when they're not around. ― Charles Bukowski |
Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.
There is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy.
There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.
My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.
We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.
I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
Great writers are indecent people. They live unfairly saving the best part for paper.
Life's as kind as you let it be.
I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.
I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.
I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
She was consumed by 3 simple things: drink, despair, loneliness; and 2 more: youth and beauty.
Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.
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| The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. ― Charles Bukowski |
To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.
Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.
The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.
I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.
Without literature, life is hell.
I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.
Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.
I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her, even the useless arguments were things ever splendid and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said: I love you.
I'm going, she said. I love you but you're crazy, you're doomed.
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Love is all right 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.
She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.
This is very important – to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything.... just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.
And yet women–good women–frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.
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| Find what you love and let it kill you. ― Charles Bukowski |
In that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.
There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.
She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.
I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay. You don't know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it's for something else.
Nobody can save you but yourself and you're worth saving. it's a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.
It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun.
People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.
Understand me. I'm not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.
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 never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.
I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: 'Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.'
Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.
I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.
I drive around the streets an inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love.
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| We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. ― Charles Bukowski |
I wasn't lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.
And when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?
People empty me. I have to get away to refill.
Writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.
Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.
One can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid.
Oh, I don't mean you're handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes - they're beautiful. They're wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.
If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.
Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom – love – happiness.
She is no longer the beautiful woman she was. She sends photos of herself sitting upon a rock by the ocean alone and damned. I could have had her once. I wonder if she thinks I could have saved her?
People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
It was a joy. Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.
Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.
It was better for me when I could imagine greatness in others, even if it wasn't always there.
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| If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence. ― Charles Bukowski |
The tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.
It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.
I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.
The trouble with a mask is it never changes.
I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
I wasn't a misanthrope and I wasn't a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.
My mother, poor fish, wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a week, telling me to be happy: 'Henry, smile! why don't you ever smile?' and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.
If you get married they think you're finished and if you are without a woman they think you're incomplete.
I've had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can't quite make out what it is. It takes time.
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.
The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.
I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.
The history of melancholia includes all of us.
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| If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose. ― Charles Bukowski |
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.
Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.
Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.
If I never see you again I will always carry you inside outside on my fingertips and at brain edges and in centers centers of what I am of what remains.
There are some who believe that old relationships can be revived and made new again. But please if you feel that way; Don't phone. Don't write. Don't arrive.
Whiskey makes the heart beat faster but it sure doesn't help the mind and isn't it funny how you can ache just from the deadly drone of existence?
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.
What is your advice to young writers? 'Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.'
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.
Purple does something strange to me.
The less I needed, the better I felt.
Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.
Are you becoming what you've always hated?
Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.
The more crap you believe, the better off you are.
Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped.
Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.
They thought I had guts they were wrong I was only frightened of more important things.
The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even during the day with covers pulled up to my chin. It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.
When a hot woman meets a hermit one of them is going to change.
If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.
Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it.
Eyes. Those damn eyes fucked me forever.
Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to.
Regret is mostly caused by not having done anything.
There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.
Beware those who are always reading books.
Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on 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 like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.
I have one problem, I don't hate people. They disgust me and I want to get away from them. I do not have hatred. I have an escape mechanism.
So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn't have you by the throat.
Dying should come easy: like a freight train you don't hear when your back is turned.
That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.
I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love, and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me.
Love breaks my bones and I laugh.
Our disappointment sits between us.
I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.
Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I've got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought.
For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.
What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.
Maybe a damned good night's sleep will bring me back to a gentle sanity. But at the moment, I look about this room and, like myself, it's all in disarray: things fallen out of place, cluttered, jumbled, lost, knocked over and I can't put it straight, don't want to. Perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready for the dangerous ones.
It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
People are not good to each other. Perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.
It's so easy to be easy – if you let it.
I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt.
Something else is hurting you – that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think.
News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.
People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.
My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.
Stay with the beer. Beer is continuous blood. A continuous lover.
I think that the world should be full of cats and full of rain, that's all, just cats and rain, rain and cats, very nice, good night.
But now and then, a woman walks up, full blossom, a woman just bursting out of her dress.... a sex creature, a curse, the end of it all.
Some men never die and some men never live, but we're all alive tonight.
When I am feeling low all, I have to do is watch my cats and my courage returns.
I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. It didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.
Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.
Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.
Food is good for the nerves and the spirit. Courage comes from the belly – all else is desperation.
Hey baby, when I write, I'm the hero of my shit.
What's genius? I don't know but I do know that the difference between a madman and a professional is that a pro does as well as he can within what he has set out to do and a madman does exceptionally well at what he can't help doing.
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can't sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
I knew I was strong, and maybe like they said, 'crazy.' But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there.
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities.
People diminish me; the longer I sit and listen to them the more empty I feel but I don't get the idea that they feel empty, I feel that they enjoy the sound from their mouths.
I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken – but there's always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed during the night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.
That's when I first learned that it wasn't enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.
I want to be with you. It's as simple, and as complicated as that.
If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it's your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.
To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.
Stop insisting on clearing your head – clear your fucking heart instead.
It seemed better to delay thinking.
I don't remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.
'The worst thing,' he told me, 'Is bitterness, people end up so bitter.'
New Year's Eve always terrifies me.
I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
Belane, are you nuts? Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?
Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working.
I tell you such fine music waits in the shadows of hell.
When you clean up a city, you destroy it.
We only asked for leopards to guard our thinning dreams.
Mercy, I think, doesn't the human race know anything about mercy?
I'm too careless. I don't put out enough effort. I'm tired.
That's what friendship is, sharing the prejudice of experience.
Fiction is an improvement on life.
Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.
Look, let me put it this way: with me, you're number one and there isn't even a number two.
Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.
There's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate.
The whole world is caught in her glance and at last the universe is magnificent.
Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.
Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.
You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive? I don't know. I'm already tired.
As a recluse I couldn't bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.
There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock. People so tired, mutilated either by love or no love.
I have gotten so used to melancholia that I greet it like an old friend.
There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.
Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.
She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.
Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
Love is a form of prejudice. I have too many other prejudices.
True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.
She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.
Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.
And love was lightning and remembrance.
I was their bar freak, they needed me to make themselves feel better. Just like, at times, I needed that graveyard.
The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
Never trust a man in a jumpsuit.
The wisdom to quit is all we have left.
Gradually I came to realize that my understanding of women goes only as far as the pleasure is concerned.