Charles Bukowski
Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Good Night
Success is always dangerous. It can make an asshole out of anybody.Collection: Dangerous
Are you becoming what you've always hated?Collection: Becoming
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.Collection: Suicide
Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.Collection: Inspirational
I was laying in bed one night and I thought 'I'll just quit - to hell with it.' And another little voice inside me said 'Don't quit - save that tiny little ember of spark.' And never give them that spark because as long as you have that spark, you can start the greatest fire again.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Uplifting
"she’ mad but she’ magic. there’ no lie in her fire.Collection: Lying
I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.Collection: Spiritual
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, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.Collection: Inspirational Love
The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.Collection: Heaven
Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can't break out of the movie. And it's a bad one.Collection: Break Out
Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hardCollection: Brother
I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude.Collection: Lonely
Some lose all mind and become soul,insane. some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual. some lose both and become acceptedCollection: Soul
In my next life I want to be a cat. To sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. To sit around licking my ass.Collection: Sleep
Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.Collection: Real
You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have.Collection: Friday
people run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.Collection: Running
Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It's just a little while, and then it burns away... Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.Collection: Love
We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.Collection: Happiness
My ambition is handicapped by lazinessCollection: Ambition
I went to the bathroom and threw some water on my face, combed my hair. If I could only comb that face, I thought, but I can't.Collection: Hair
Sex is interesting, but it's not totally important. I mean it's not even as important (physically) as excretion. A man can go seventy years without a piece of ass, but he can die in a week without a bowel movement.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: Laughter
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 stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. 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.Collection: Atheist
I am not a snob; it is simply that I am not interested with what most people have to say, or what they want to do — mostly with my time.Collection: People
Only the boring get boredCollection: Bored
I like women who haven’t lived with too many men. I don’t expect virginity but I simply prefer women who haven’t been rubbed raw by experience. There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk in their eyes in their laughter and in their gentle hearts. Women who have had too many men seem to choose the next one out of revenge rather than with feeling. When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can’t insist on love or demand affection. You’re finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing.Collection: Laughter
Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.Collection: Communism
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.Collection: Drinking
So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.Collection: Beautiful
I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me . . . To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day . . . was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.Collection: Mother
I grow tired of 18th century moralities in a 20th century space-atomic ageCollection: Tired
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.Collection: Drunk
Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.Collection: Lying
I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.Collection: Ocean
People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be.Collection: People
I think I need a drink.' 'Almost everybody does only they don't know it.Collection: Drinking
the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.Collection: Taken
You are thirty minutes late." "Yes." "Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?" "No." "Why not, pray tell?" "Well, if the funeral was mine I'd have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.Collection: Funeral
pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more.Collection: Pain
A woman is a full time job. You have to choose your profession.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Flower
people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.Collection: People
there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there, I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep, but I don't weep, do you?Collection: Clever
Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.Collection: Girl
If you are going to try, go all the way or don't even start. If you follow it you will be alive with the gods. It is the only good fight there is.Collection: Fighting