Charles Bukowski
Early evening traffic was beginning to clog the avenue with cars. The sun slanted down behind him. Harry glanced at the drivers of the cars. They seemed unhappy. The world was unhappy. People were in the dark. People were terrified and disappointed. People were caught in traps. People were defensive and frantic. They felt as if their lives were being wasted. And they were right.Collection: Dark
A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.Collection: Fire
New Year's Eve always terrifies me.Collection: New Year
we know God is dead, they've told us, but listening to you I wasn't sure.Collection: Listening
That was the trouble with being a writer, that was the main trouble—leisure time, excessive leisure time. You had to wait around for the buildup until you could write and while you were waiting you went crazy, and while you were going crazy you drank and the more you drank the crazier you got.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Being Alone
life itself is not the miracle. that pain should be so constant, that's the miracle -Collection: Pain
Meanwhile the 3 a.m. drunks of the world would lay in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it.Collection: Sleep
human relationships simply aren't durable. I think back to the women in my life. they seem non-existent.Collection: Thinking
...having nothing to struggle against they have nothing to struggle for.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Flower
if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.Collection: Crazy
it's good to have things done with when they don't work it's also good not to hate or even forget the person you've failed with.Collection: Hate
I give you soul. I give you wisdom and light and music and a bit of laughter. Also, I am the world's greatest horseplayer.Collection: Laughter
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.Collection: Beautiful
It’s hard to drink when you dance. And it’s hard to dance when you drink.Collection: Drink
When you clean up a city, you destroy it.Collection: Cities
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 themCollection: Hands
They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.Collection: Country
sometimes there's nothing to say about death.Collection: Sometimes
Love dries up, I thought as I walked back to the bathroom, even faster than sperm.Collection: Bathroom
The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy.Collection: Kindness
Once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own tail, it swallowed and swallowed until it got halfway round, and there it stopped and there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own self. Some fix, that. We only have ourselves to go on, and it's enough.Collection: Dream
I often stood in front of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly a person could get.Collection: Mirrors
My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people.Collection: Heart
There is light somewhere.Collection: Light
Few beautiful women were willing to indicate in public that they belonged to someone. I had known enough women to realize this. I accepted them for what they were and love came hard and very seldom. When it did it was usually for the wrong reasons. One simply became tired of holding back love and let it go because it needed some place to go. Then, usually, there was trouble.Collection: Beautiful
...in that drunken place you would like to hand your heart to her and say touch it but then give it back.Collection: Heart
Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth.Collection: Beer
writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.Collection: Writing
I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.Collection: Taken
It's better to do a dull thing with style than a dangerous thing without it.Collection: Style
No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.Collection: Men
I wish to weep but sorrow is stupid. I wish to believe but belief is a graveyard.Collection: Sad
I am a series of small victories and large defeats.Collection: Victory
It’s the order of things: each one gets a taste of honey then the knife.Collection: Order
Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don't forget indigestion. I wasn't different from anyone else: There sat the 18-pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.Collection: Thanksgiving
My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.Collection: Crazy
I didn't like anybody in that school. I think they knew that. I think that's why they disliked me. I didn't like the way they walked or looked or talked, but I didn't like my mother or father either. I still had the feeling of being surrounded by white empty space. There was always a slight nausea in my stomach.Collection: Mother
Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.Collection: People
What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.Collection: Sex
We are hardly ever as strong as that which we create.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Real
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.Collection: Poetry Is
I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.Collection: Reality
American women drove hard bargains and the ended up looking the worst for it. The few natural American women left were mostly in Texas and Louisiana.Collection: Texas