Factotum

by Charles Bukowski

That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.

I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it.

starvation, unfortunately, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it. A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach.

Once you realized that everything was a hoax you got wise and began to bleed and burn your fellow man.

Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.

“I’ve given you my time. It’s all I’ve got to give—it’s all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour.”

“…my time so that you can live in your big house on the hill and have all the things that go with it. If anybody has lost anything on this deal, on this arrangement…I’ve been the loser. Do you understand?”

“People don’t need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn’t be.”

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.

Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.