Charles Bukowski
they simply never understand, do they, that sometimes solitude is one of the most beautiful things on earth?Collection: Beautiful
stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.Collection: Drinking
Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it.Collection: Wall
My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover. ~ Falsely yoursCollection: Love
True revolution comes from true revulsion; when things get bad enough the kitten will kill the lion.Collection: Lions
Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn't have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink's office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.Collection: Crazy
If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.Collection: Love Yourself
Sundays kill more people than bombs.Collection: Sunday
Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.Collection: Fashion
People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.Collection: People
The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life to a function that doesn't interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.Collection: Giving
And don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.Collection: Useless
It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Pain
Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Love Is
I have no time for things that have no soul.Collection: Ordinary World
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.Collection: Alive
I lie as truthfully as I can.Collection: Lying
The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever.Collection: Cat
Death is not the problem; waiting around for it is.Collection: Waiting Around
We’ve died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.Collection: Care
I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.Collection: Mad
Death meant little to me. It was the last joke in a series of bad jokes.Collection: Littles
I don't remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.Collection: Morning
With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.Collection: People
Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.Collection: Animal
Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.Collection: Stress
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.Collection: Running
if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it.Collection: Heart
Those who preach god, need god Those who preach peace do not have peace Those who preach love do not have loveCollection: Needs
Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.Collection: Waiting
An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.Collection: Taste
The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Heart
It’s so easy to be easy—if you let it.Collection: Easy
People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.Collection: Mean
Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.Collection: People
Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist. 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.Collection: Knives
If you let them kill you, they willCollection: Ifs
too often, the only escape is sleepCollection: Sleep
Without literature, life is hell.Collection: Literature
Dog is much admired by Man because he believes in the hand which feeds him. A perfect set-up. For 13 cents a day you've got a hired killer who thinks you are god. A dog can't tell a Nazi from a Republican from a Commie from a Democrat and, many times, neither can I.Collection: Dog
If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.Collection: Humanity
Women: I liked the colors of their clothing; the way they walked; the cruelty in some faces; now and then the almost pure beauty in another face, totally and enchantingly female. They had it over us: they planned much better and were better organized. While men were watching professional football or drinking beer or bowling, they, the women, were thinking about us, concentrating, studying, deciding - whether to accept us, discard us, exchange us, kill us or whether simply to leave us. In the end it hardly mattered; no matter what they did, we ended up lonely and insane.Collection: Football
Pretty words, as pretty women, wrinkle up and die.Collection: Wrinkles
I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.Collection: People
I think that everything should be made available to everybody, and I mean LSD, cocaine, codeine, grass, opium, the works. Nothing on earth available to any man should be confiscated and made unlawful by other men in more seemingly powerful and advantageous positions.Collection: Funny
I was only photographing in words the reality of it all.Collection: Reality