Charles Bukowski famous quotes

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Soul #Ordinary #World

Dying in a a war never stopped wars from happening.
-- Charles Bukowski

#War #Dying

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard
-- Charles Bukowski

#Brother

If you want to create, you'll create...
-- Charles Bukowski

#Want

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Spiritual #Hurt #Giving Up

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Suicide #Soul #Burning

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Trying #Way

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Heart #Space #Waiting

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Sadness #Thinking #Sick

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Drinking #Beer #Order

Those who escape hell however never talk about it and nothing much bothers them after that
-- Charles Bukowski

#Hell #Bother

What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Sex #Women #Want

We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Life #Odds #Laughing

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Alive #Pay #Back To Work

Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Beautiful #Writing #Giving

My part of the game is that I must live the best I can.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Games

Our disappointment sits between us.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Disappointment

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Morning #Inspirational Love #Coffee

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#War #Winning #Saving

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Morning #Positivity #Thinking

being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Sometimes

I stopped looking for a Dream Girl, I just wanted one that wasn't a nightmare.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Girl #Dream #Nightmare

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Wall #Writing #Waiting

It began as a mistake.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Mistake

You have to die a few times before you can really live.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Inspirational

There are only two things wrong with money: too much or too little.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Two #Littles #Too Much

You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn't deceive anybody. It's the deceivers who make you feel bad.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Running #One Direction #Forgiving

my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Tree #Soul #World

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire
-- Charles Bukowski

#Motivational #I Hate You #Fire

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Inspirational #Feel Good #Soul

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it
-- Charles Bukowski

#Soul

New Year's Eve always terrifies me.
-- Charles Bukowski

#New Year #Years

I was beaten down long ago in some alley in another world.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Long #World #Another World

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Heart #Mind #Mouths

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Suicide #Wall #Drinking

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Life #Sunset #Thought Provoking

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

#Death #Circus #Existentialism

I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Morning #Color #Awakening

Why do you insist upon destroying yourself?
-- Charles Bukowski

#Destroying

the tired sunsets and the tired people - it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Tired #Sunset #People

Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Night

And I said to myself that he was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Firsts #Said

God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Fads #Too Much #Lasts

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Faith #Stupid #Humor

Each person is only given so many evenings and each wasted evening is a gross violation against the natural course of your only life.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Evening #Natural #Given

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Jobs #Passion #Firsts

In New York you've got to have all the luck.
-- Charles Bukowski

#New York #Luck

Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.
-- Charles Bukowski

#People

to fight for each minute is to fight for what is possible within yourself, so that your life and your death will not be like theirs.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Fighting #Minutes

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Cities

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Art #Tacos #Great Art

I don't remember going to bed, but in the morning, there I was.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Morning #Bed #Remember

Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Crowds #Introvert #Constant

The hangover was brutal but he didn't mind. It told him he had been somewhere else, someplace good.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Hangover #Mind #Brutal

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. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Real #Sadness #Inability

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Morning #Alive #Stills

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Crazy #War #Wine

To be young is the only religion.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Young

The crazy ones only laugh when there is no reason to laugh.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Crazy #Laughing #Reason

the tigers have found me and I do not care.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Care #Found #Tigers

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Drinking #Hangover #Thinking

it's better to be happy...if you can..!!
-- Charles Bukowski

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Fashion #Art #Style

I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can't be quite senseless because you are aware that it's senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?
-- Charles Bukowski

#Mean #Giving #Awareness

I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Lonely #Self #Pity

I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Suicide #Jesus #Sleep

Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Genius #Idiot #Born

there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy
-- Charles Bukowski

#Women #Ready

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Drinking #Jail #Bail

I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.
-- Charles Bukowski

#People #Looks

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Men #Drunk #Bars

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Love Is #Psychics #Rivers

The streets were full of insane & dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Monday #Nice #People

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Taste #Millionaire

I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Love #Romantic #Writing

Human relationships didn't work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death--in a cesspool.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Real #Two #People

If you let them kill you, they will
-- Charles Bukowski

The trouble with a mask is it never changes
-- Charles Bukowski

#Trouble #Mask #Never Change

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...
-- Charles Bukowski

#Lonely #Loneliness #Suicidal

as the spirit wanes the form appears
-- Charles Bukowski

#Spirit #Form

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Inspirational #Life #Simple

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Funny #Spiritual #Men

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Drinking #Emotional #Everyday

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Reinventing Yourself

dogs and angels are not very far apart
-- Charles Bukowski

#Dog #Angel

People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.
-- Charles Bukowski

#People #Moral #Ability

I walked around the block twice, passed 200 people and failed to see a human being.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Block #People #Humans

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Trust #Order #Differences

I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. 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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Jobs #Sleep #Men

If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Dog #Love Is #Junk

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Essence #People #Mad

Careful poetry and careful people live only long enough to die safely.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Long #People #Enough

I wasn't sleeping on the streets at night. Of course, there were a lot of good people sleeping in the streets. They weren't fools, they just didn't fit into the needed machinery of the moment. And those needs kept altering.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Sleep #Night #People

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Grief #Sorrow #Cry

Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Communism #Capitalism

People do too much. They say too much.
-- Charles Bukowski

#People #Too Much

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.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Running #Moving #School

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Guy #Chance #Needed

It didn't pay to trust another human being. Humans didn't have it, whatever it took.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Pay #Humans

as a child i suppose i was not quite normal. my happiest times were when i was left alone in the house on a saturday.
-- Charles Bukowski

#Children #House #Normal