On Writing

by Charles Bukowski

I don’t think if I wrote it now it would be any good, though. I would have to get properly worked up. Besides, I have so many personal worries right now that I’m in no shape to look into a mirror, let alone run off a book.

I’m not one to look back on wanton waste as complete loss—there’s music in everything, even defeat—but

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

But primarily Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.

when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don’t know what’s happening, nor do I care.

I think that $2 a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces and typewriters) entitles one to the special privacy of a special insanity and if I need hold hands with paper gods to promote a little scurvy rhyme, I’ll take the encyst and paradise of rejection.

A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up.

Eliot seemed to me an opportunist, going where the slickest gods gave the quietest gifts, which is great and gentile, but not human

I might even say that a poem should not be a poem, but more a chunk of something that happens to come out right.

but poets are bad on the digestion and sensibility,

It’s very odd, I thought, how people can be so very “shitty” (to use one of their terms) and write poetry too. But now, after meeting a few of them, I know that it is entirely possible. And I do not mean the clean fight, the rebel, the courage; I mean thin-minded glory-grabbers, money-mad, spiritually dwarfed.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

But it’s only when a man gets to the point of a gun in his mouth that he can see the whole world inside of his head. Anything else is conjecture, conjecture and bullshit and pamphlets.

Creation is our gift and we are ill with it. It has sloshed about my bones and awakened me to stare at 5 a.m. walls. And musing leads to madness like a dog with a rag doll in an empty house.

Certainly the charm in dying lies in the fact that nothing is lost.

when he goes they will have trouble rubbing him out because they don’t quite understand him, and not understanding him, the dull and vacant parts, the mass of italics, they will think this to mean genius.

all the lights within them have fucked themselves to pieces and out.

But I’m sure laying on the bologna tonight . . . blue true bologna and a bellyfull.

But I am thin as a fake, so I often write a bad poem written mostly by myself rather than a good poem written mostly by somebody else.

All hail the mad gods who have created these fine spinning things.

The Creeleys will never know death; even when it arrives they will think it is for somebody else.

I can now write better, I think, on a full stomach, but maybe it is because I remember all the years it was empty and that it will, most probably, be that way again.

but when some kind of teeth are digging into you it doesn’t set for calmness and meditation.

The curtains wave like a flag over my country and the beer is tall.

Now I don’t know what I’m talking about anymore. That’s the danger of talking. You talk talk talk all wax and wallow and pretty soon you don’t know what you are saying . . . I don’t . . . that’s why I feel much better when I am mostly quiet.

the morning is not strong enough to stand the night.

no need to hack at infinities,

whatever I write, good or bad, must be me, today, what it is, what I am.

if the world changes at all it will be because the poor are fucking too much and that there are too many fucking poor and the few rich power boys will get scared because if you get enough poor and they are poor enough not all the propaganda newspapers in the world will be able to tell them how lucky they are and that poverty is holy and that starvation is good for the soul. if these people have the vote, things are going to change and if they don’t have the vote the riots are going to get bigger redder hotter heller.

Los Angeles is a Cross, and we all hang here, stupid little Christs.

“duty” is a dirty word, and “beautiful” is a put down word. you want to knock somebody off his dusty little legs—just demand that he be “beautiful.”

it’s a wasted scene, a little something like a horror movie—you really want to laugh but the air smells bad. I think the whole twisted beastly thing has something to do with the U.S. of America, tho I am not sure. Christ, can Europeans fuck-up like that? I suppose they can, but not with such consistency and accuracy.