Top 856 Quotes & Sayings by Charles Bukowski - Page 3

The less I needed, the better I felt.

Only the boring get bored

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

people run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.

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.

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.

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

People empty me. I have to get away to refill.

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

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.

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.

Sundays kill more people than bombs.

Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge.

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.

Insanity is relative. Who sets the norm?

To create art means to be crazy alone forever.

With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible. The less people I saw the better I felt.

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. Neither do I. Maybe that's why we get along.

and when love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself. we ask for no mercy or no miracles; we are strong enough to live and to die and to kill flies, attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can't sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles; and don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.

Drinking is another way of thinking, another way of living. It gives you two lives instead of one.

Goodness can be found sometimes in the middle of hell.

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself.

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

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.

Death is nothing, brother, it's life that's hard

If I never see you again I will always carry you inside outside on my fingertips and at brain edges and in centers centers of what I am of what remains.

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.

I am for the small man who has not forgotten, for the man who loves his beer and his women and his sunlight

I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.

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.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

Death meant little to me. It was the last joke in a series of bad jokes.

If you let them kill you, they will

I lie as truthfully as I can.

Those faces you see every day on the streets were not created entirely without hope: be kind to them: like you they have not escaped.

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.

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

I just want a hot cup of coffee,black,and I don’t want to hear about your troubles.

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?

as the spirit wanes the form appears

Lighting new cigarettes, pouring more drinks. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.

I've never met another man I'd rather be.

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.

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.

Are you becoming what you've always hated?

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.

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

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.

Without literature, life is hell.

You can steal my women but don't play with my whiskey.

We’ve died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.

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.

Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.

I have no time for things that have no soul.

The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn't know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.

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

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.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone.

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.

Things get bad for all of us, almost continually, and what we do under the constant stress reveals who/what we are.