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

"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)

"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

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

"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)

"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

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— 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 beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world."
— Charles Bukowski

"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)

"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

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

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

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

"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

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

"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

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

"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

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

"each man's hell is in a different
place: mine is just up and
behind
my ruined
face."
— Charles Bukowski

"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off."
— Stephen King (Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay)

"Get busy living or get busy dying."
— Stephen King (Shawshank Redemption)

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."
— Stephen King

"I have the heart of a small boy...and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
— Stephen King

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
— Stephen King

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
— Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

"Go then, there are other worlds than these."
— Stephen King (The Gunslinger)

"I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all."
— Stephen King

"That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night. -- A Feast of Snakes"
— Harry Crews

"Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.
"
— Harry Crews (Blood and Grits)

""Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, 'Hey, man, the ball game's up'.""
— Harry Crews

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them--if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that is wants to live humbly for one.

Quoted in J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" "
— Wilhelm Stekel

"This fall I think you're riding for--it's a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
— Kurt Vonnegut