"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"Do you hate people?

I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."
— Charles Bukowski (The Movie: Barfly)

"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 stone-written. 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."
— Charles Bukowski

"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 (Women: A Novel)

"My ambition is handicapped by laziness"
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. 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."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late"
— 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

"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."
— Charles Bukowski

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

"Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink."
— Charles Bukowski

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

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
— Charles Bukowski

"“If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose”"
— Charles Bukowski

"Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing."
— Charles Bukowski

"Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them."
— Charles Bukowski

"you have to die a few times before you can really
live."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice."
— Charles Bukowski (Women)

"those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that."
— Charles Bukowski

"Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone."
— Charles Bukowski

"I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of."
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"you boys can keep your virgins
give me hot old women in high heels
with asses that forgot to get old. "
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"I wanted the whole world or nothing."
— Charles Bukowski (Post Office)

"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

"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

"there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock"
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
— Charles Bukowski

"People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love."
— Charles Bukowski (Women)

"the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.

"The Wine of Forever""
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"there is always one woman to save you from another and as that woman saves you she makes ready to destroy"
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"The shortest distance between two points is often unbearable."
— Charles Bukowski

"there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant."
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"Great art is horseshit, buy tacos."
— Charles Bukowski

"It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
"
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

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

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."
— Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye: A Novel)

"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

"It was like the beginning of life and laughter. It was the real meaning of the sun"
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"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

"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."
— Charles Bukowski

"Life's as kind as you let it be."
— Charles Bukowski (Hot Water Music)

"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

"Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline."
— Charles Bukowski

"Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness."
— Charles Bukowski

"The trouble with a mask is it never changes"
— Charles Bukowski

"We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
"
— Charles Bukowski

"A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover."
— Charles Bukowski (The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems)

"in this land some of us fuck more than
we die but most of us die
better than we fuck"
— Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 1974-1977)

"We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting"
— Charles Bukowski