What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

by Charles Bukowski

in the sun and in the rain and in the day and in the night pain is a flower pain is flowers blooming all the time.

arriving to applause through Spanish doorways hardly ever works. eating an apple sometimes works.

the museum of pain doesn’t charge admission, it’s free as skunkshit.

they’ve got us in the cage ruined of grace and senses and the heart roars like a lion at what they’ve done to us.

many of the paperboys here in L.A. are starting to grow beards. this makes them look suspiciously like bad poets.

I’m told he jumped off a roof because a woman wouldn’t love him.

all the poets wanted to get disability insurance it was better than immortality.

art hasn’t improved life like it should, maybe because it has been too private?

I’ve got to agree with my critics when they say I write a lot of shit.

you are alone and I am alone and it’s best that we aren’t together comparing our pitiful sorrows.

we all need something we can do well, you know. like scuba diving or opening the morning mail.

to be writing poetry at the age of 50 like a schoolboy, surely, I must be crazy;

but once you get the taste, it’s good to get your teeth into words. I forgive those who can’t quit. I forgive myself. this is where the action is, this is the hot horse that comes in. there’s no grander fort no better flag no better woman no better way; yet there’s much else to say— there seems as much hell in it as magic; death gets as close as any lover has, closer,

to create art means to be crazy alone forever.

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

waiting on death can be perfectly peaceful.