Factotum

by Charles Bukowski

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.

“Baby,” I said, “I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.”

great lovers were always men of leisure. I fucked better as a bum than as a puncher of timeclocks.

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?

For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.

Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren’t writers, or even cab drivers, and some men—many men—unfortunately aren’t anything.