Screams From the Balcony Quotes

“No wonder Van Gogh blasted his head off. Crows and sunlight. Idle zero. Zero eating your guts like an animal inside, letting you shit and fuck and blink your eyes, but nothing, a nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“Well it’s good to have a car like that, once in a while somebody’ll say, ‘why don’t you come over for dinner?’ and I can just say, ‘Car won’t make it.’ I don’t have to tell them that time is scarcer than young pussy around here, and I don’t mean time to write POETRY. I mean time to lay in bed, alone, and stare up at the ceiling and not think at all, not at all, not at all…”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“i never understood society. i undersand that it works somehow and that it functions as a reality and that its realities are necessary to keep us from worse realities. but all i sense are that are plenty of police and jails and judges and laws and that what is meant to protect me is breaking me down...”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“I still believe in more privacy and less talk.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“i do not like to work and have no trade but i do like to eat, so this is basic, the basic training of slaves to fear...”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“i'm easy to understand even when i don't understand myself...”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“Today I will walk in the sun. I will simply walk in the sun.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“I know it’s impossible to explain this to you. I carry this terrible aching hell in my heart.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“December 25, 1963
Christmas night and they’ve battered their heads together until they are silly and they’ve smiled themselves silly and vomited on the floor, 98% of them amateur drinkers, amateur Christians, amateur human beings”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked—most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don’t like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“the worst sin in the world is when the poor try to rob the poor. the enemy is fairly obvious, why weaken our ranks?”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“Death is a sophisticated afternoon in Santa Fe, with nobody saying what they are thinking.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“I was a janitor for a while but I can never imagine a man calling himself a Floor Engineer when he has to walk into the woman’s crapper and clean up what they leave behind. I couldn’t get a hard-on for a year after working in that place. what they leave behind. and on the floor. and in that little compartment behind the seat. or alongside of it. or wherever it was.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“Life is Tuesday afternoon in a cage.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970

“the horns of grief need no honing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams from the Balcony

“this is a pretty good feeling. some people go around looking for good feelings.”
― Charles Bukowski, Screams From the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970