Charles Bukowski
how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?Collection: Kind
It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.Collection: Pay
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others.Collection: Needs
People don't do me much good.Collection: People
It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.Collection: Self
Her violence frightened me. She always claimed that I was the jealous one, and I was often jealous, but when I saw things working against me I simply became disgusted and withdrew. Lydia was different. She reacted. She was the Head Cheerleader at the Game of Violence.Collection: Jealous
If you can hit a guy once, you can hit him twice.Collection: Guy
You don't go on "probably" when love and guns are in hand.Collection: Gun
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.Collection: Baby
I'll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there's time.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Gun
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.Collection: Hate
We do not abandon ship. I say, as corny as it may sound, through the strength and spirit and fire and dare and gamble of a few men in a few ways we can save the carcass of humanity from drowning. No light goes out until it goes out. Let's fight as men, not rats. Period. No further addition.Collection: Fighting
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Odds
Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.Collection: Cat
A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.Collection: Serious Illness
What good are you? What can you do? It has cost me a thousands of dollars to raise you, feed you, clothe you! Suppose I left you here on the street? Then what would you do?" "Catch butterfliesCollection: Butterfly
The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.Collection: Jobs
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 sawCollection: Mother
That's what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.Collection: Prejudice
I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.Collection: Running
people see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it's great. an Academy Award means that you don't stink quite as much as your cousin.Collection: Cousin
I knew exactly what I was doing: I was doing nothing. because I knew there was nothing to do.Collection: Doing Nothing
That's your response to everything: drink?" "No, that's my response to nothing.Collection: Drink
beware those quick to praise for they need praise in return beware those who are quick to censor they are afraid of what they do not know beware those who seek constant crowds for they are nothing alone beware the average man the average woman beware their love, their love is average seeks averageCollection: Love Is
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.Collection: Beautiful
I got lost somehow, began staring up her legs. I was always a leg man. It was the first thing I saw when I was born. But then I was trying to get out. Ever since I have been working in the other direction and with pretty lousy luck.Collection: Men
Bullfighting can be an art Boxing can be an art Loving can be an art Opening a can of sardines can be an artCollection: Art
love be damned now as love was damned when it first arrived.Collection: Love Is
it seemed to me that I had never met another person on earth as discouraging to my happiness as my father. and it appeared that I had the same effect upon him.Collection: Father
A woman has to have something on or there's nothing to take off.Collection: Women
This incompleteness is all we have.Collection: Incompleteness
you are on the freeway threading through traffic now, moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful and so disappointing because we are all so alike and so different.Collection: Moving
We are all museums of fear.Collection: Museums
I can't blame her. but wonder why she's here with me? where are the other guys? how can you be lucky? having someone the others have abandoned?Collection: Guy
The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.Collection: Gathering
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.Collection: Essence
Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.Collection: Drink
The less I needed, the better I felt.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: People
I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.Collection: School
Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.Collection: Crowds
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.Collection: Baby
Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicityCollection: Writing
Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Drinking
I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here.Collection: Victory