Charles Bukowski quotes
Born
August 16, 1920 Andernach, Rhine Province, Prussia, Weimar Republic.
Died
March 9, 1994.
Occupation
Poet, novelist.
Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. His work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work.
There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.
– Charles Bukowski
I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
– Charles Bukowski
Never get out of bed before noon.
– Charles Bukowski
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
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
– Charles Bukowski
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence.
– Charles Bukowski
I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.
– Charles Bukowski
Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours.
– Charles Bukowski
Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.
– Charles Bukowski
We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
– Charles Bukowski
The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you’ll live 10 times longer than if you have 10. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. It’s truly ridiculous.
– Charles Bukowski
A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go.
– Charles Bukowski
Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
– Charles Bukowski
Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.
– Charles Bukowski
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
I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
– Charles Bukowski
The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.
– Charles Bukowski
Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.
– Charles Bukowski
I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.
– Charles Bukowski
Almost everybody is born a genius and buried an idiot.
– Charles Bukowski
I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.
– Charles Bukowski
It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
– Charles Bukowski
Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.
– Charles Bukowski
If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.
– Charles Bukowski
My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‘light’ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
– Charles Bukowski
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.
– Charles Bukowski
You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.
– Charles Bukowski
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
To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.
– Charles Bukowski
You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
– Charles Bukowski
Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
– Charles Bukowski
Humanity, you never had it to begin with.
– Charles Bukowski
It’s possible to love a human being if you don’t know them too well.
– Charles Bukowski
Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.
– Charles Bukowski
To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.
– Charles Bukowski